Many people who are blind still prefer a feature phone over a smartphone because they find dial pads easier to navigate and control than a flat touchscreen. Indeed, in the January 2015 issue of AccessWorld we reviewed the Odin VI, a blind-friendly feature phone with a pre-enabled voice guide. In this article we will take a look at a brand new offering from Odin: the Nexus 5 running Claria Vox. This phone works like a talking feature phone, only this one is based on the Android operating system. The Nexus 5 includes a suite of apps designed specifically for accessible, touch-button control, but you can also operate the phone as a standard touchscreen device running Android 4.4.2 KitKat, and enjoy the same features and apps as other accessible smartphone users.
The Claria Vox Keypad
The Nexus 5 Claria Vox is a standard Google Nexus 5 smartphone with a maximum 16 GB of memory (it's not possible to increase memory on the phone with a micro SD card). The phone arrived in the original Nexus 5 packaging, along with a micro USB charging cable and power adapter. The Nexus 5 Claria Vox is a standard Android smartphone, with a Sleep/Wake button on the right edge, Volume Up and Down buttons on the left, a headphone jack on the top and a USB power port on the bottom. The phone does not have physical Home, Back or Recent Apps buttons.
They phone's keypad and touch-button functionality is facilitated by a tactile overlay. The Claria Vox arrives fitted with a black, rubber, bumper-style phone case that covers the bottom half of the touchscreen with a total of 19 small rectangular cutouts you touch like buttons—I'll refer to these cutout areas as "buttons" or "keys" from here on. When your finger meets the touchscreen glass exposed by these buttons, you can activate a combination of standard Android controls and a feature-phone-style keypad. The overlay includes three separate areas, which can best be described from the bottom up: At the bottom center is the Android Home button. Above the Home button are four rows of three keys each: a standard phone keypad. Use these keys to enter numbers and letters the same way you do on a standard feature phone. A small raised line just beneath the 5 key replaces the customary raised dot. When you are in a text edit field, the Star (*) key cycles through various punctuation marks and the Pound (#) key cycles through numbers to lower and upper case letters. Other times the Star key announces the time and date and the Pound key announces missed calls, text messages, and the like.
A wide raised line separates the top of the keypad from two rows of buttons that activate many of the Claria Vox controls. The two middle buttons in these two rows are the Up and Down keys. To the left of the Up key is the Menu button, which will either open the application specific menu button, or, whenever you are in an edit field, accept voice dictation. To the right is the Status/Correct button. In standard mode this button reports connection and GPS status and battery connection. When in an edit field, it acts as a backspace key.
To the left of the Down button is the OK button; to the right is the Android Back button. Use the Back button to back out a screen and eventually return to the main Home screen.
At first I found using the overlay a bit awkward. However, after I noticed the two raised areas I found it somewhat easier to orient my fingers. I do wish the separation between the top two command rows and the dial pad were much wider, however. Reaching for the 2 button, for example, almost required reaching to the very top of the overlay and then counting down three buttons. If I didn't do it this way, all too often I would mistype, since I am not accustomed to beginning a dial pad entry partway down the dial pad, despite the raised separators.
My nails are trimmed fairly short, so I found it easy to point my fingertips straight down into the recesses to reach the touchscreen. Women with longer nails may find it difficult to do this, and may have to use the pads of their fingertips and press just a bit harder on the overlay to activate the buttons.
Using the Claria Vox Interface
My Nexus 5 arrived pre-charged, and when I turned it on it came up speaking with the Talkback Android screen reader configured with the Google text-to-speech voice set at a moderate speed and medium volume. Normally on Android phones you must "Slide to unlock" in order to begin using the phone. You must also do this with the Nexus 5, but you do not have to locate a particular spot on the touch screen or move left to right. Merely slide a finger in any direction against the exposed upper glass of the touchscreen and Claria will announce: "Home…Phone, one of nine."
You are now on the Claria Vox home screen, and as you have probably guessed, Phone is the first of nine Claria Vox applications. You can use the Up and Down buttons to scroll through the list, or enter the number of the desired option.
Phone
To answer a call, press the OK button; to reject a call, or hang up on an existing call, press the Back button. The Claria Vox does not announce caller ID by default, but a quick touch of the screen while the phone is ringing prompts the announcement. Some may appreciate the privacy afforded by this design. I tend to carry my phone in my pocket, however, and would prefer to hear this announcement by default, which is not currently an option.
Pressing the OK button at the Phone prompt calls up a menu of five options:
Dialer
Use this option to enter a phone number, then press the OK button to place the call. You can also use the Dictate button at the uppermost left of the overlay to speak the phone number you wish to dial. For me dictation worked perfectly, even when I purposely mumbled a few of the digits.
Contacts
Use this option to search your contacts. Use the Up and Down buttons to scroll through your list, or enter a letter (press the 8 key twice, quickly, to enter a "U," for example). Pressing the Menu button offered options to create or import a contact.
Call Log
This option presents a list of calls, and allows you to recall, text message, or create a contact from the log.
Voice and Numeric Shortcuts
This option allows you to set speed dials and voice prompts for quicker dialing.
Voicemail
I had difficulty setting up my voicemail. The first time you access this option you are taken to the voicemail setup, where you are prompted to enter a PIN. However, with the phone against my ear, I could not make dial entries, and if I lowered the phone I could not hear the prompts. I was advised by the company that pressing the OK button anytime during a call toggles speaker phone mode. This worked, but it also pointed out a lack of context-sensitive help.
Text Messages
Use this option to send, read, and reply to text messages. Current feature phone users will be familiar with the steps to compose and review messages. You may be surprised how quickly you can send out a message when you use dictation, however. Speak some text and Claria Vox will offer up multiple responses. I almost always received 100% accurate responses and could select the first option presented, but I could also cursor down to select from other, slightly different responses.
The e-mail option was easy to set up using my Gmail account. Unfortunately, however, Claria Vox did not download my Gmail contacts or calendar. I rather suspect this is a limitation of Android overlays, since I experience the same issue with the EqualEyes Android suite, which I reviewed in the December 2013 issue of AccessWorld.
See below for a solution to this problem.
Vision Aids
This option includes several useful camera-based apps:
Optical Character Recognition
Claria Vox includes a basic Optical Character Recognition (OCR) program. It is no match for something like KNFB Reader, but I found it serviceable, especially for flat, printed pages. Activate the app, hold the phone over the page to be scanned, then touch the screen or press OK. You can read the results using the Up and Down buttons, and then save the text, image, or both.
Color and Light Detectors
With either of these apps enabled, simply touch the screen or press OK to get a reading. I found both of these very handy.
Camera
Here you can use your camera to snap a photo or take a video. Press the 1 key to toggle the light. One extremely useful feature was the ability to give an image or video a description before saving it to the Gallery. The camera app also includes a bar code identifier that will search the Internet for scanned products. I have never had much luck using such apps, and for me the Claria Vox proved no exception.
Utilities
The Claria Vox utilities include a Notes app you can use to create and edit notes, including text you save using the OCR app. You can also accessibly browse the Android File Manager, set alarms, create and listen to voice memos, access the calculator, consult your calendar and enter new appointments, and check your local or remote weather.
Claria Vox also includes an accessible GPS app based on Google Maps and navigation. The entry fields say "Enter Address Only," but I was able to dictate a location, such as the name of my local hospital, and the app entered the information perfectly. You can set the travel mode, alert announcement distance, and location update frequency. The GPS does not have "look around," capabilities.
Multimedia
The Nexus 5 Claria Vox offers several additional apps that enable access to smartphone mobile capabilities using a talking, feature-phone interface.
Mobile Web Browsing
Some feature phones offer rudimentary Web browsing, but none do it especially well. The ability to browse the Web on the go may be one of the main reasons you may be considering stepping up to a smartphone, and the good news is that the Claria Vox overlay offers up a capable Web experience.
Webpages you call up—via voice search, bookmark, direct URL entry, or pressing OK on an already loaded page—will read to the end automatically. Pressing the 9 key will pause and restart page voicing. You can also use the Up and Down buttons to move through the page. Pressing the 1, 2, 3, or 4 buttons will filter the page by element, links, headings, and forms respectively, similar to a computer browser's quick navigation shortcut keys. Press 3 for example, then use the Down button to navigate by headings. Press the 1 key to continue element by element.
I found browsing with the Claria Vox browser significantly easier than with any feature phone I have evaluated. I would not trade in my touchscreen browser, however.
Claria Vox Radio
This app gathers links to many popular radio stations from around the world. The listings were a bit out of date—several of the streams I tried returned error messages. But I was able to add other MP3 or MPU streams, and then add these stations to my favorites.
Claria Vox News
The News app offers a list of news sources sorted by country. The US list currently includes Voice of America, CNN News, ESPN, ABC 17 News, and the Los Angeles Times. You can listen to the articles being read in full, or use the Up and Down buttons, but, frustratingly, the web browsing 9 button to toggle reading off and on did not work. I also wished there were a way to add extra RSS feeds to the news reader.
Claria Vox MP3 Player
This app plays the music files you have downloaded onto your device. At first I was unable to fully test this app because USB tethering to my computer would not work by default. After consulting with an Odin representative, I was instructed to enter the Android Settings menu, access the Storage option and enable a USB connection. This worked, but hopefully the company will enable tethering by default soon.
Either pressing the OK button or touching the Nexus screen acts as a Play/Pause button. The player also played some, but not all, of the videos I tried. It had no trouble with MP4 files, but AVI files would not play. Nor would the short video I created to my iPhone and e-mailed to myself.
The Claria Vox Book Reader
The Claria Vox Book reader will open Daisy 2, MP3 books and text files. It is also supposed to open Audible books. Unfortunately, currently, the first time you log into your Audible account using a new device, you must complete an inaccessible CAPCHA. There is a link for blind users, but on the Claria Vox browser, this did nothing.
Bookshare and BARD Mobile Talking books are also not supported on the Claria Vox.
Android Applications
You can run all of your device's standard Android apps on the phone using Talkback. There are nineteen apps listed in this menu option, including Google Play Store, Google Wallet and Android Device Settings. If you invoke any of these you will be taken out of the Claria Vox skin and placed into standard Android mode running Talkback with a slightly different voice, which makes it easy to keep track of which mode you are in. Most of the Android standard Talkback swipe and tap gestures are available to you using the top half of the phone, which is not covered by the tactile overlay. However if you wish to enter text you will need to remove the tactile overlay in order to access the onscreen keyboard. You can also install and use a Bluetooth keyboard.
A discussion of Talkback accessibility is beyond the scope of this review. However I will note that the Up and Left home gesture will return you to the Claria Vox software menu. If you added any Play Store apps to the phone they now show up in the Android Applications list. Also, if you log into your Google account using the Play Store or another app, your contact lists will now appear in the Claria Vox phone, text messaging, and e-mail apps.
Updates
This option enables a quick way to update the Claria Vox apps, add new Claria apps as they are released, and update your phone's operating system. During my evaluation of the Nexus 5 Claria Vox there were no updates to install. I would have thought that a Nexus phone would be eligible to upgrade to the newest Android version, Lollipop, but this was not the case.
Settings
This option offers access to all of the standard Android settings. This is where you go to join a Wi-Fi network, and enable Bluetooth, GPS, and NFC. Other settings include voice language and speed, color scheme, and text size, and braille display settings.
One setting that is unique to the Claria Vox is the Android Interaction setting. The first option in this menu is Home Button Long Click. Enable this toggle and you can perform a long touch of the Home button to toggle back and forth between the Claria Vox app list and the default Android Home screen.
Recommendations
The Nexus 5 Claria Vox software could definitely benefit from some upgrading. Odin did not create this software; they licensed it from a British company. Consequently, it will remain to be seen how responsive the developers will be with software updates and adding new apps, such as the ability to read BARD Mobile Talking Books.
All that said, I believe that for some people with visual impairments the Nexus 5 Claria Vox will be an excellent mobile experience. As noted above, many people with visual impairments feel much more confident using a keypad, and for these individuals the Claria Vox tactile overlay offers a one-of-a-kind way to pair the ease of using a keypad with the power of a smartphone.
Another reason I suspect many people with visual impairments are reluctant to upgrade to a smartphone is the all-or-nothing change such a move represents. It takes time to learn to use a touch screen reader effectively, and during this learning period your phone may seem less than useless. With the Nexus 5 Claria Vox you can spend the day using the phone in keypad mode, then, when you have free time, you can explore the more advanced Android features and develop touch screen skills at your own pace (and with the excellent help of Odin tech support and a series of audio tutorials I am told the company will soon release).
Product Information
Product: Nexus 5 Claria Vox
Available from: Odin Mobile, 855-217-9459
Price: $599 (comes unlocked for both the T-Mobile/Odin and AT&T networks)
Related articles:
- A Review of the Odin VI: An Accessible Feature Phone from Odin Mobile
- Leveling the Android Playing Field with the EqualEyes Launcher and Suite of Accessible Smartphone Apps
More articles from Bill Holton:
