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Quick Tip: Share Apps From the Home Screen

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Image showing VO Change app icon with Share 3D Touch Item.

Have you ever wished there was a faster and easier way to share apps with your friends without going to the app store and searching for it? iOS 10 brings you the ability of sharing apps with your friends directly from the home screen.

Here is how it’s done.

  1. Find the app you want to share and 3D touch on it.
  2. Tap the share app button at the end of the list.
  3. The share sheet will appear and you will be able to choose the option you want.

This is a much faster way to share apps. You wont have to spend time looking around in the app store looking for an app you want to share. For people that have phones without 3D touch, or have 3D touch turned off, you will have to go to the app store to share apps.

This feature is only available to devices that support 3D Touch, so you will only have access to this on newer iPhones running iOS 10.

Quick Tip: Using Safari as an RSS Reader

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Subscriptions screen in iOS

Safari is Apple’s Web browser for iOS and Mac OS, but did you know that it could also be used as a RSS reader? RSS stands for Rich Site Summary, and it is used in creating content that users can subscribe to like blogs. The iAccessibility Report is one such blog that uses RSS. For this tip, we will use the home page of accessibility.net and you will be subscribed to our feed by the time we are done.

Using Safari as an RSS Feed reader

For this tip, we will use accessibility.net as the website, and we will assume that you are on an iPhone. You will find that this process is very similar to the iPhone on iPad and the Mac because Apple builds all of their software to behave very similarly no matter what device you run it on.

To get started, find the show bookmarks button at the bottom of Safari. Tap or double tap here, and you will have a heading for your bookmarks. If you flick right several times you will hear an option for Social Links. This is where you double tap. This section is labeled as such because you can see all of the links that are shared on your connected social accounts, but you can also see all links in the pages you subscribe to. To edit your connected accounts and your feeds that you are subscribed to, flick until you hear Subscriptions and double tap. This is the button at the bottom right of the screen, and it will be after all of the items in your social links, so dragging your finger to the button may be faster. Once you have double tapped on Subscriptions, you may want to find the switches for your connected accounts and disable these as these will clutter your social links

To add accessibility.net to your list of subscriptions, move your focus to the bottom right of the screen and you will hear an option called Add Current site. Double tap on this to add the site to your subscriptions. This will work on any website that allows for RSS. If the site you are on does not support subscriptions then this button will be dimmed. Once you have added the feed to your site then you will see that the Add current site button will be dimmed.

While on the Subscriptions screen you can delete subscriptions by flicking right or left to the undesired subscription and then by flicking up or down until you hear Delete and then double tap.

Conclusion

Safari is a very powerful web browser, and the social links tab under bookmarks allows Safari to be a fairly powerful RSS feed reader without needing to download an app for this purpose.

Is FARE Fair?

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FARE app icon

Many companies have swooped in to the Austin area to pick up the slack that Lyft and Uber have left, but as we always do here at iAccessibility, we must ask if we can use that app for that, and if Fare is fair.

App Accessibility with FARE

A few weeks ago I reviewed Get Me for iOS, and we determined that their app had no VoiceOver accessibility and riders could not even request a ride. FARE is a lot different in this regard. With FARE, a rider can request a ride and see all details about their ride. I did find some text fields complicated and some buttons are not well labeled, but these are issues that the company could easily fix. I think the only buttons I found that were not accessible were buttons to see what kind of car you would pick and they went in order from standard, premium and SUV from left to right. I was able to request a ride and get an estimate, which turned out to be more than the actual ride was, which is something new from an app like this.

FARE also has a few good perks that Lyft, Uber and Get Me does not have. FARE lets you set preferred drivers, and you can even schedule rides in advance. I think these features make them above the standard ride share. They also have no surge pricing which is a major plus. I was able to go through the app and view all of these features with VoiceOver with very few accessibility issues. Unlike other apps, the menu icon is on the top right instead of the top left.

Once you have finished your ride you will be promoted with a tip screen. Here you can say if you would ride with that driver again, set preferred, and tip. You can also see your total price, and they will even show you an itemized receipt so you can see how they charged you, which is just awesome.

One button that needs to be fixed is the ETA button. VoiceOver only reads eTA, and the timer does not update for sighted users as well. While using the app I kept seeing 11 minutes until my driver picked me up.

Besides a few badly labeled buttons, my only other complaint is that there is no Apple Pay support or even support for PayPal. I would like to see their service use more of these as they are more secure payment methods.

Conclusion

While there are some bugs and issues with FARE, the app is far more accessible than Get Me, and it turns out to be cheaper as well. I was even surprised to see a Lyft driver that I previously had on Lyft pick me up on FARE, so I totally added him to my preferred list.

FARE – Website

FARE – iOS App Store

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