In the June 2011 issue of AccessWorld, we reviewed Mobile Accessibility for Android by Code Factory, an accessible suite of Android apps paired with an integrated screen reader. More recently, in September of 2013, Microsoft teamed up with Code Factory to produce Mobile Accessibility for Windows Phone. The software is free through the Ease of Access Center on phones running Windows Phone 8 Update 3 (GDR3) or later. For now, the software is available exclusively in the US, and text-to-speech is English only.
The Nokia Lumia 925
I was given the opportunity to put Mobile Accessibility for Windows Phone (MA) through its paces on a Nokia Lumia 925, which is available with LTE service on T-Mobile and AT&T. The phone was sturdily constructed, and felt both solid and light in my hand, despite its size (approximately 2.78 inches wide by 5.08 inches tall by one-third inch thick).
The Lumia 925 boasts a 4.5-inch, 1280 by 768 AMOLED display with a 15 by 9 aspect ratio. It is powered by a QUALCOMM Snapdragon Dual-core 1.5 gigahertz processer, and comes with one gig of RAM, 16 gig of device storage and an additional 7 gig of free SkyDrive cloud storage. The battery is not replaceable by the user and is rated for a maximum 19 days of standby time and 10.3 hours of 3G talk time. A power adapter and micro-USB charging cable are included. The phone also supports wireless charging with an optional accessory cover.
Taking a brief tour of the Lumia 925, on the top edge, left to right, you will find the SIM card tray, the micro-USB port, and a 3.5mm audio jack. The left and bottom edges are smooth, and the right edge, from top to bottom, hosts the device's volume rocker, the screen lock button, and the hardware camera button.
The Lumia 925 has an 8.7-megapixel main camera and a 720p secondary camera for video chats. Unfortunately, as you will see, you can use neither with MA 8.
Installing Mobile Accessibility for Windows Phone 8
You can't install MA without sighted assistance, and I needed a double session with my sighted wife to get the job done.
When you first start a Windows phone you get the usual license agreement to confirm, Wi-Fi to select, etc. You are then asked to enter your Windows Live ID and password. You are given the option to skip this step for now, which we did, figuring I could enter this information myself after I got speech up and running.
The MA instructions provided the following steps: Open Settings, then scroll down to the Ease of Accessibility Center, tap to open, and then look for the Mobile Accessibility options to download and install the software. There we discovered that you could download the software, but you could not install it without first entering your Windows Live ID and password.
My wife entered my Windows Live ID e-mail address and password, but I got a "password not valid" message. A second try yielded the same results. We took a break while I fired up my Windows 8 machine and logged off and back in again. The password worked fine. That's when I found an e-mail from The Microsoft account team with the subject line "Microsoft account Action required for two-step verification on your Windows Phone."
Apparently, when I first set up my Windows Live ID account, I had enabled the two-factor authentication. With this security feature enabled, there are certain instances, such as when setting up a Windows phone, when you have to obtain an app code and enter it when you receive a login password error. I applaud Microsoft for going the extra mile when it comes to security, but I think they should be user-friendly enough to ask for the app code and tell you how to obtain one right there on your log-in screen, instead of making you go looking for the reason your new phone won't accept your password. I never did obtain an app code. I took the shortcut I suspect many users do; I temporarily disabled two-factor authentication.
With this done, my wife and I were finally able to download and install MA, and after a required phone restart, I was set to go.
My journey began with a brief tutorial demonstrating MA touch commands, such as double tapping to activate an item, triple tapping to open an app's Quick Menu, and others we will discuss below. All MA gestures use one finger only.
The Basics
The main MA screen contains a grid of nine apps:
- Phone
- Contacts
- Messaging
- Alarms
- Calendar
- Web
- Location
- Settings
Swiping either side to side or up and down moves you through the various app icons, and a double tap activates the highlighted app.
At the bottom of the Lumina's screen there are three touch-activated soft buttons. From left to right they are Back, Start, and Search. The Back button works normally, returning you one level back, out of menus and closing apps. A touch of the Back button from the MA home screen calls up the message, "Are you sure you wish to exit Mobile Accessibility? Slide left for yes. Slide right for no." If you do accidentally turn off MA, a long press of the Camera button will restart it. Unfortunately, this means anyone who is sharing the phone with you cannot use the physical Camera button to snap photos. They have to call up the camera app and use touch commands.
The Start button has also been redefined. Touching this button causes MA to announce the time and date. A touch-and-hold gesture announces the battery level, along with your Wi-Fi and phone network status.
The Search button has several MA functions, depending on what you are doing. A long press of the Search button prompts MA to repeat the last text utterance. Follow the long press with a second press and the utterance will be spelled character by character.
Settings
Mobile Accessibility uses the Microsoft Zira voice, which I found clear and understandable. The Settings menu offers four voice speeds, but no pitch or punctuation controls.
MA reads all punctuation, which I found a bit verbose at times. Keyboard echo can be set to none, letters, words, or both letters and words, which is the default. MA also numbers any list items it encounters as they are spoken, but you can turn this off in the Settings menu. Spell phonetically is turned off by default. Secret Mode causes MA to speak the characters you enter or delete in a password field, but you can also set this to "Silent," or "Speak stars."
A final setting you can make is to turn on Advanced User Mode. Turning on this setting causes MA to stop offering prompts and suggestions.
MA offers no access to phone settings, such as screen brightness or lock screen behavior. You will need sighted help to make any such changes. I found this more than a little disappointing.
Phone
The Phone app allows you to place calls either via your Contacts list or by entering a phone number. The Contacts list was easy to navigate and use to place calls. The keypad did not allow for touch entry, however, you have to swipe or tap to highlight a digit, then double tap to enter it. The Backspace is at the upper right of the keypad.
You can long press the camera key to toggle between speaker and earpiece. The sound quality on the Lumia 925 was excellent, but there is no speaker phone option using MA When you receive a call, double tapping on the screen offers up the caller ID information. When I called from my iPhone, MA announced the phone number, and after I had entered my data into the Contacts it announced my name, instead. A slide up answers a call, a slide down hangs up or rejects an incoming call and sends it directly to voicemail.
I was unable to change ring or message tones on my own. I also needed sighted help to set up my voicemail box through the main Windows Phone interface. Then, to my utter disappointment, I discovered that I couldn't access my voicemail from within MA or even be alerted that I have a message waiting for me. I left several messages for myself, and for each the call log showed a missed call. I would have thought the Quick Menu would have offered an option to listen to voicemail. It did not.
Contacts
Despite having entered my Google account credentials into the MA e-mail app, Mobile Accessibility did not grab my contact list, or my calendar. I was advised by a Code Factory technician that I needed to log in to people.live.com and link my Gmail contacts and calendar to my Microsoft account. I did this, but neither my Contacts list nor my calendar would update.
I was able to enter contact info manually. Triple tapping any contact calls up the Quick Menu, where you can call or message the contact, view the contact's details, and add, delete or edit a contact. Everything here was well laid out and accessible.
Messaging
The MA Messaging app is rather limited. You can only send an SMS text to one contact or phone number at a time. Selecting a second contact replaces the first. You also cannot send multimedia messages.
When you receive a text, MA announces "New Message." It does not read the text itself, however. I would have thought a double tap on the screen would have voiced the message, much the same way it announces the Caller ID when you receive a call. Instead you have to exit what you are doing and open the Messaging app to do that. Also, if you miss a message, you will not know it is there until you open the messaging app and happen upon it.
Received messages appear in a browser window, one window per contact. You can swipe down the list of received messages, but you can't re-read messages you have sent. The Quick Menu allows you to delete that message thread or to call the text sender. There is also a "Compose Reply" button at the top of the message list.
The onscreen keyboard is a standard modified QWERTY keyboard, but you cannot swipe and double tap. Instead, you enter characters by locating them and then lifting your finger. Holding the key for more than a second or so causes MA to announce the letter in caps, and after a bit longer, a number, symbol, or mark of punctuation associated with the key. I found this extremely useful when typing text, but the options to enter number and symbol modes are also available.
Another keyboard feature I enjoyed was tapping the "Search" button to toggle review mode between character, word, and sentence. This made it quite easy to swipe navigate through already-entered text to make insertions and deletions. Unfortunately, it also made it far too easy to send the message prematurely, as the "Search" button is directly below the Enter key, which sends the text message and which is easily activated by mistake. The "Back" and "Start" buttons are also too-easily activated during data entry. The "Start" button kept me updated on the time. The Back key exited the app, so I had to be extremely careful entering a "Z" or searching for the Shift or typing mode keys.
There is no support for voice dictation.
Alarms
You can set any number of alarms, and choose their frequency: one time, daily, etc. You cannot change the alarm sound through MA, however, and I was unable to find a snooze feature.
Calendar
As mentioned, the MA Calendar app did not import my Google calendar.
I am also told that because of OS limitations, it is not possible to enter new appointments using MA, making this app more or less useless, in my opinion.
The E-mail app's Quick Menu offered me the choice of setting up my e-mail manually or choosing one of 19 presets that would auto-complete many of the IMAP server settings. The options included both Yahoo! and Gmail, along with a long list of outdated options, such as CompuServe and Prodigy. Inexplicably, there was no help for users of Hotmail, Live.com, or Outlook.com.
Double tapping an e-mail message started reading from the very top, announcing all of the header information (to, from, subject, etc.), before it began voicing the actual message.
E-mails are displayed in a Web view. See more about webpage navigation in the next section. You can pause reading at any time with a quick press of the phone's "Camera" button; resuming reading required the following steps:
- triple tap to call up the Quick Menu
- navigate the Quick Menu down to the Reading option, then double tap
- navigate the Reading menu until you find either "Read from top" or "Read from this position," and then double tap
Needless to say, I did not spend a lot of time reading emails with MA. I did create and reply to a few messages, and that was when I realized that other than sending text messages, the message editing window is the only opportunity MA offers to compose and edit text. There is no built-in editor. I could not open attachments of any kind using MA.
Web Browsing
Web browsing was a bit more manageable using MA. The Quick Menu summoned the address bar. Alternatively, you can use the "Back" button to toggle off the keyboard and choose from among your bookmarks. Triple tapping at this point calls up options to set your homepage, or add/remove the current page to or from your favorites.
The Quick Menu Settings option included pre-enabled options to "Read whole page on download," "Reset navigation on download," and "Remember last visited page."
The Quick Menu Reading option offered four modes: "Read from current position," "Read from top," "Read summary," and "Read title."
One MA feature I did very much enjoy while surfing the Web was the navigation toggle. Instead of performing a complicated gesture to change between links, tables, headings and other elements, as you must do with iOS and Android, with MA a quick touch of the Search key cycles you through the various modes. You can only move forward through the choices, however. To get to the previous navigation mode in the list you must circle back around.
The Quick Menu Navigation option includes a number of additional modes not included in the Search key rotor, such as jumping by visited links, sentences, and same form element. Use left and right swipes to move forward or backward through the webpage by your chosen element. Then swipe down or up to review the page in greater detail.
Each new page begins with a summary, listing the numbers of links, tables, forms and other navigation units, information useful in deciding how to proceed with page navigation. As with the E-mail app, performing a read to end required far too many touches and taps.
Location
MA location services are extremely limited. Basically, when you open the app, you are given your current location. There is no way to create a route, or receive turn-by-turn directions. You can only instruct MA to announce your changing location. You do this by summoning the Quick Menu and ticking the checkboxes to "Keep screen on" and "Speak location automatically." Also, you have to remember not to lock your phone.
I took the Lumia 925 for a walk around my neighborhood. It performed adequately, announcing the street name and number several seconds after I made each turn, and every few minutes on a long stretch of road. But considering the wealth of other accessible navigation apps currently available, this is not a solution I would consider if I am boarding a bus or venturing into parts unknown.
Conclusions
Ten years ago, Mobile Accessibility for Windows Phone would have been considered cutting edge. Today, the best that can be said is that it is several years behind accessibility solutions for iOS and Android. There is no braille support at all. You can't run Windows Phone apps with speech using MA. You can't access your free Skydrive cloud storage. I was even unable to get a YouTube video to play using the MA browser.
Considering these and all the other limitations I have described in this article, I can see only a single case in which a blind individual might wish to use a Windows Phone running MA, and that is if your employer's IT department insists and your job depends on it. Even then, I would advise carrying a second Android or iOS device for actual productivity.
Microsoft contracted with Code Factory to produce MA and from my discussions with the company I have gleaned that many if not most of the software's limitations are due to the fact that Microsoft did not ask for them to be included.
Technical support for MA is available for free on the Code Factory website. This suggests that perhaps the company might be engaged in ongoing product development, which they cannot discuss. Microsoft recently surprised the access community when it partnered with GW Micro to offer a free full-featured screen reader, Window-Eyes, to anyone using a licensed copy of Office 2010 or 2013. Could they have another surprise waiting for us? I, for one, certainly hope so.
Product Information
Nokia Lumia 925
Available in black, white and grey from T-Mobile and AT&T at the following off-contract prices:
AT&T: $399
T-Mobile: $504
Mobile Accessibility for Windows Phone
Available from: Code Factory
