Wileyfox Swift Accessibility Bundle Part 2 This is the second part of
my review of this device. If these are not useful let me know.
The first part on purchasing and setup was posted yesterday.
I am currently using the Swift as a replacement for my Nexus 7 tablet
and as such am concentrating on its potential as a Media Playing Device.
In other words using it as if if was a Victor Reader Stream or Plextalk
Pocket etc. I have not used it as a phone yet and only really anticipate
it as the moment as a backup phone.
This second part is largely concerned with assessing the device as a
unit suitable for blind users with hearing impairment.
My hearing loss is evaluated as being in the severe range by my
Audiology service. I have tried listening to the device without wearing
hearing aids and with. Although the phone has a suitably loud speaker
I have concentrated here on its use with earphones.
The sound quality and volume levels ovviously vary with earphones and
for the weekend I I have been using the JVC Folding over ear earphones
currently available from Sainsburys on their online Grocery Store for
about £13. These are nice padded comfortable earphones which provide
acceptable quality for my ears and excellent volume output.
I will feed back on System TTS, Google Music, the Audible App, Kindle
Reading app, and the VoiceDream Reader app for this review. I am aware
that there are other media options which I will come to in due course
possibly in future posts.
System TTS.
The Swift comes with a high quality Google TTS Voice which is
responsive and has a good volume when set to maximum. I was able to hear
the output clearly both whilst wearing hearing aids and with the
headphones sitting over my ears without hearing aids. This is the
experience I normally prefer as I have never found a hearing aid which
will transmit sound quality as well as a loud device set at a high
volume. Sending the sound through the intermediary my various NHS
hearing aids over the years always causes a deterioration in sound quality.
I installed my copy of Eloquence and set this as the system voice.
Whilst the sound volume was acceptable I found, to my surprise, that the
inbuilt TTS voice was significantly louder, and importantly seemed more
responsive. So by the end of the weekend I had switched back to the
default Google Voice. I am still an Eloquence fan and am glad I have
the option of the voice on the device but I will stick with Google for now.
Kindle Reading App
The Kindle Reading app installed fine and my Kindle books were instantly
available. A very big part of why I want an Android Device is the
ability to use Kindle with the Eloquence voices. As far as I am aware
this is the only platform on which this is legally available. It is just
my preference but for long book reading, and certainly for study
Eloquence is the clearest voice for rapid reading of books. In essence I
think the Swift is probably worth the purchase money alone if all it
offers is the ability to read consistently with this Kindle setup. A big
plus.
The main downside is that it does not appear, at the moment possible to
read Kindle books with the screen locked. I would be interested if
anybody has got around this. For the time being then reading Kindle
books is an armchair experience which I guess puts us on a level
playing field with sighted readers. To avoid the locked screen problem I
set my sleep time in Android Settings to the maximum 30 minutes.
The volume levels were acceptable and comprehensible for me both wearing
hearing aids and useing earphones without hearing aids.
Audible App
This was the big disappointment of the weekend. For some reason the
Audible Book I downloaded was very quiet and was definately the quietest
example I found of media played on the device. It was significantly
quieter than the book I heard on my iPhone last week. I might have just
been unlucky with the book production and for a fair comparison I need
to load this same book as well into my iPhone. You would definately need
to have earphones placed over hearing aids to get an acceptable volume
out of this app. I have not tried a loop headset, however I do not
normally like using these for mobile listening around the house as I
find that using a loop really does cut out all the ambient sound in the
house and you will have no chance of hearing door bells / telephones etc.
Google Music
I only tried this briefly but the volume level returned as normal for
the playback of music and seemd fine with both earphones and hearing aids.
Voicedream Reader.
This is certainly not as slick as it's iOS manifestation but I still
managed to get the player up and running. Annoyingly the app crashed the
phone when I was trying to download an additional voice from the Google
Play Store and this voice now refuses to work.
Despite that, once you get used to it the app performed well for me over
the weekend. There are a few things you will need to learn about using
Reader. The first and most important is that it is hopeless, I found
trying to import books into the app using the app import function.
Basically you need to work outside of the app. I found both ebooks and
a zipped audio book in the DropBox app, double tapped on those and
Reader immediately appeared as an option to open with. Using this method
importing books into Voicedream was straightforward.
The other thing to customise with Voicedream Reader is voices. You have
the option of using on start up one of the high quality Acapella voices.
Scottish Rhona or Graham are the options offered to me. You are not
restricted to this single voice though. You can use the Manage voices
and Add Voice setting to import the surprisingly large number of
additional TTS voices available on the Swift. Any voice installed on
your device will be available. Not only was I able to import 2 of the
Eloquence Voices, which as I say is important for me, but I was also
able to import several Google TTS voices which are of high quality.
The main drawback of using system TTS as opposed to the voices you buy
as in app purchases is that apparently the highlighted tracking of words
is not available for those with low vision. However as I am blind this
does not personally affect me.
The other big plus of the VoiceDream Reader is that both ebooks and
audio books play perfectly acceptably in locked screen mode so that you
can happily continue to listen whilst you are doing the housework.
As far as volume is concerned Voicedream delivered TTS at system levels
so was fine for my listening purposes. The audio book was at least 50%
louder than the maximum volume available through the audible app. Of
course you can also use PC utilities like mp3gain to bgoost the volume
of your audio books before you even import them into Voicedream.
So in summary for this part of the review, with the exception of the
Audible app the device performed well in delivering acceptable output.
The ebook reading was louder than that available, for example, with the
victor Reader Stream.
Using Google Now I was able to launch each reading app just by using
Voice command. Controlling the players through the lock screen seems
more of a challenge and I probably need to learn some techniques to
achieve this. At the moment I am having to unlock the device and find
the pause button which is a little clunky.
Still if you want an Eloquence eBook reading device a setup similar to
this is probably the only game in town.
David Griffith
vlo
** To leave the list, click on the immediately-following link:-
** [mailto:access-uk-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx?subject=unsubscribe]
** If this link doesn't work then send a message to:
** access-uk-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
** and in the Subject line type
** unsubscribe
** For other list commands such as vacation mode, click on the
** immediately-following link:-
** [mailto:access-uk-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx?subject=faq]
** or send a message, to
** access-uk-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with the Subject:- faq
