Month: November 2017

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This week on the Life After Blindness podcast, Tim is joined by Maria Johnson from girlgoneblind.com, Marty Schultz from Kid Friendly Software and Shaun Preece from the RNIB Teh Talk and Double Tap Canada podcasts.

We begin with Maria sharing her “Because of My Blindness” story. Maria talks about what she has learned and how she has grown since going blind.

Tim then introduces Shaun Preece to the podcast. They start by listening to an interview Tim conducted with Marty Schultz about the issues he has been having with Apple concerning his Blindfold series of games.

Marty tells Tim in the interview that upon further review and after such a great response from the community, Apple has reversed their original decision. Which had been to flag Marty’s games as spam and preent him from adding new games and updating his current games. Marty says that Apple took the time to consider his appeal, liten to the community as well as play the games for themselves and ruled that the Blindfold Games did not meet the requirements of their new rule.

After Tim and Shaun discuss the fallout of this news, they move on to other topics.

Net, they discuss the new character limit increase for Twitter. Then they debate the iPhone X and whether someone with no vision like Tim should get one.

They round out their discussion by referring to an email from listener Beth. Beth asks about the Samsung Galaxy phones from a year ago and their issues with exploding batteries. Tim ties this into the recent news about the screen burn-in on the new Google Pixel 2 XL phones.

Thank you very much for listening to another episode of Life After Blindness!

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Welcome to the Life After Blindness Spotlight podcast. My special guest this week is Marty schultz from Kid Friendly Software. Marty develops the Blindfold Games series that we all appreciate and love!

This special edition of the podcast is to Spotlight the issues that Marty is having with Apple and a new rule they have implemented that is preventing him from adding new games at the App Store as well as updating any of his existing apps.

In this interview, Marty talks about the humble beginnings of the Blindfold Game series and it’s growth up untill now. He explains the current issues that he’s having with Apple and what we can do as a community to help him remedy the problem. He also talks about the possible future of Kid Friendly Software and what he would like to do if Apple would change this rule.

Below is a description of the problem in Marty’s own words from his blog:

Two weeks ago, Apple rejected 3 updates: Blindfold Hopper, Blindfold Craps and Blindfold Horserace, by saying it violates a new rule of the App Store: apps that vary only by content (such as video or audio or text) must be merged into one app.  I explained that these apps are all different, and that only their menus and settings screens are similar.  I requested a phone call to discuss this further.  Tap here for details on Apple’s rejection.

On Wednesday night, I talked with an Apple representative, and Apple’s decision is that unless I merge the 80 Blindfold Games into a handful of apps, they will no longer allow new games to be released or allow updates to be made.

From a technology perspective, that’s extremely hard and time-consuming.  From a business perspective, that would mean spending hundreds of hours recoding the games, with no possible return-on-investment.  Most of the games generate sales in the first three months of the game being released, and I’ve been building these games for 4 years.

From a usability perspective, that means the main menus would be ridiculously complex, and the settings screens would be confusing and almost unusable.

If you are unhappy with this decision, you can express your opinion to Apple.  The accessibility desk is at accessibility@apple.com or you can call 1-800-MY-APPLE.  Thanks to everyone for enjoying my games.