I Was on the Point of Getting an Android Phone!

It's no secret that the latest release of the I O S operating system contains quite a number of problems. These are by no means limited to the accessibility arena, but also affect mainstream customers as well. This is further evidenced by a number of updates being released within a short time-frame.

As part of the plan we have with our mobile phone provider, we are in the fortunate position of being able to upgrade to the latest phone each year, and so we both decided to go for the iPhone Pro 11 Max. Coupled with I O S13 and beyond, so far this has brought us its fair share of troubles. We initially had difficulty copying videos to our Windows PC, (necessary so I could carry out post-production work on them). At least twice now I have had the entire audio interface muted following a phone call. The new Voice Control feature, (while quite good at what it does), has significant difficulties when used in conjunction with VoiceOver. Regarding the Voice Control issue, I've seen a number of tweets extoling its virtues, and it is an exceptionally good first run. But do not be under any illusion that it can be relied upon quite yet, especially if you have limited vision. In my view, it has some seriously fundamental flaws, even if you do not use VoiceOver.

I'm not foolish enough to think these bugs will never be resolved. I am sure they will in time. However, they did make me think that we need to look at the alternative, which is of course the Android platform. Fortunately, Nick Adamson put together a very timely podcast which gave us the results of his two year experiment of using an Android phone. He was a long-time iPhone user, so I was very keen to hear what he had to say. It was an excellent podcast, well recorded, and gave us the information in a clear and concise conversational manner. Do have a listen to it.

When I heard the podcast, I was impressed with what the phone could do. There were a lot of things I wanted to try out for myself. I did some research, and discovered that the tutorial on the web for the TalkBack screen-reader was quite comprehensive, well laid out and highly accessible, certainly good enough to follow through and learn information in a systematic manner. Yes there were still some questions needing to be answered, but a little research via Google helped with that.

I then visited our local phone store, which just happens to be the store specifically for our phone provider. A Sales Assistant spent plenty of time showing to me the Google Pixel 3 and 3A. Using Google Assistant, I was easily able to send a text message to a contact by dictating it, and navigating the phone with the TalkBack screen-reader presented no challenges at all. While some of the gestures vary slightly from the iPhone, these are by no means insurmountable and some of them I believe can be customised.

So by this point I had a good understanding of which apps were accessible that I wanted to work with to get things done, and I certainly felt I could get a Google Pixel and get myself started without difficulty. I was on the point of getting a phone, but thought that I would have a think about it. I was actually quite excited about learning how to work with it.

However as the day went on, some flaws began to appear in this plan.

I knew from the outset that Braille screen input, by default, was not an option. It is not part of the TalkBack screen-reader. Aside from dictation, this is the most productive way for me to get text into the phone, for tweets, Facebook posts, text messages and notes. But I did note there were apps you could install so as to allow this to happen. What concerned me a great deal was the suggestion on Twitter that you could not use one of these apps in conjunction with TalkBack. This to me seems very strange. If this were true, you would have to disable TalkBack, use the Braille screen input, and enable it again. I cannot honestly see that being in any way productive.

But the real issue for me is recording video. We spend a lot of time recording videos and taking pictures, so any phone I did get would have to be good at doing that and provide the same functionality as we have at the moment.

As standard, it would seem that no phone in the pixel series records in true stereo when videoing, despite them having two microphones onboard. While there may be apps for audio recording in stereo, that does not interest me. There are far superior devices than a phone to make audio recordings of high quality. But with the iPhone, we do have stereo recording when filming, and we've no intention of going back to mono.

Again, I am very grateful to people on Twitter who did recommend an app which possibly may allow video to be filmed with stereo recording. But after some preliminary tests carried out on the Pixel 2, there was some uncertainty about whether it would work on the Pixel 3 series.

This caused me to delve a little deeper into the whole area of videoing on the Pixel 3 series and to compare the microphones on both the iPhone and the Pixel. There's no doubt that the audio reproduction is better on the iPhone. There are plenty of YouTube videos around which demonstrate this very well, even if you compare like for like mono sound on both devices. Apparently when the Pixel 3 was initially released, the audio reproduction was really quite poor, and I've heard some samples of that. It is very much better now, but not as good as the iPhone.

I then watched some professionally produced videos concerning comparisons of what the different cameras can do visually. Again, there's not much doubt about it. The iPhone does come out on top, by a small margin admittedly, but the 11 Pro Max does seem to be the winner there.

So what does this all tell me?

Granted I've only put one day into researching this area. But I think I've discovered a lot in a short time. I'm still very much interested in working with an Android phone, and that interest isn't going to go away. But the lack of Braille screen input, and the audio reproduction in stereo when videoing concern me a lot. On the issue of video quality, yes the iPhone does have this annoying habit of applying noise reduction which is not to my taste. I have far better tools at my disposal to deal with that than the phone could ever provide. But from what I've discovered, despite its shortcomings at present, we do have the best phone available to us for what we want to do with it, both in terms of functionality and from an accessibility perspective.

In summary, I'm going to keep a very close eye on what the Pixel 4 has to offer in the coming months. That could be interesting, and I also look forward to learning more about any innovations which might be available using TalkBack.