Tester B feedback (visually impaired user)

Using Talkback on and Android 4.2 device Nexus 4 - an experienced user of the 
existing DaisyReader app who is registered blind with some partial vision.

His initial impression is the new app is a self-voicing app with custom 
gestures doesn't match his expectations. One of his open questions is: 

   * Should the app meet the Android UI paradigms?

He discovered Scan books and pressed it, followed by a double-tap, when he 
thought it should read the title of the books found. It needs to speak the name 
of the book. You can explore the screen but it reads the folder name rather 
than the title of the book.

He experienced some error messages, possibly when trying to read a book called 
"About a boy". We will investigate this later on.

Problem started when he double-tapped the book title. He didn't know what to 
expect at that point... He tried swiping around and double-tapping. He could 
see it was highlighting the name of the folder. 
He finally long-pressed on the folder, then it went into the mode selection. 
Odd behaviour, but it seemed to work. 

He tried Simple Mode, that was unpredictable in terms of getting the gestures 
to work with Explore-By-Touch enabled. (as Explore-By-Touch 'requires' the 
extra gesture). He was never sure why the gestures sometimes worked and 
sometimes different. He experimented with the gestures to try and understand 
why they sometimes seemed to work and sometimes did't seem to do anything.

The visual mode seemed to work much better, he was able to find the buttons 
using Explore-By-Touch. Most of the time he could navigate forward and back OK. 
Stop always seemed to work ok.  

When he went to the table of contents - the layout feels like an odd place, The 
whole UI needs redesigning... It seemed the table of contents was in 2 columns 
- it was announcing 2 chapter numbers e.g. Chapter 6 Chapter 1, Chapter 8 
Chapter 3, etc.
   * We will also investigate this behaviour later.

He hasn't properly tried the Bookmarks, he did set a bookmark. Lots of "empty 
radio button, not clicked" was voiced by the app. Eventually he found his 
bookmark and tried to load it (for Chapter 3). The bookmark seems to 'work' at 
least at a basic level.

He recommends we change the label of the Play button to reflect what happens 
the next time it's used. e.g. Play, then Pause.

When he disabled TalkBack, the gestures seemed to work a bit better in Simple 
Mode.

In terms of improvements to the UI: 
Should we try to make it behave like standard Android behaviour. Part of this 
might depend on whether the app should work on older devices with a D pad. Or 
consider going wholly self-voiced. Then about managing the expectations of the 
user e.g. to suspend TalkBack in JellyBean (android 4.2), Down & Right gesture. 
Then move the finger to the top-left of the screen to pause TalkBack (even 
though it's not in the circular menu).

We would have to voice every single control, and the extra considerable work 
that means. How is a user expected to ... with a screen full of controls. 

One idea would be to create an exemplary JellyBean app that takes advantage of 
the latest Android design patterns.

It needs to support epubs fully so we can read it with this app. It should be 
able to read a book using TTS. 

Open Questions:
   * Should we try to have one app that works for all versions of Android?
   * Do we have separate versions, pre and post ICS? One that works with Explore-By-Touch and the other that doesn't.
   * One consideration is to use the old (existing) DaisyReader Navigation with the new player (with buttons rather than using gestures). All elements would need to be focusable so they work with a D-Pad (or a virtual D-Pad). 
   * pre-ICS without a D-Pad, then allow gestures?

We agreed to continue discussing the app's design. We will also seek additional 
feedback from Accessibility evaluators.
Original issue reported on code.google.com by julianharty on 17 Jun 2013 at 8:33
ravin353 / android-daisy-epub-reader

Tester B feedback (visually impaired user) #64
