Ever since I acquired a set of disabilities myself, I got interested in accessibility tools; small tools which help me and potentially others in improving life.

Living with a disability brings up new challenges very day. Many of these challenges can not be solved by an App, but some apps do help. Here a list of Android apps which I found very useful.

Live Transcribe & Notification

Live Transcribe & Notification is an app which turns on your microphone, listens to speech and transcribes it to written text. It even works offline for some languages, including:

  • German
  • English
  • French
  • Italian
  • Japanese
  • Spanish

It works kind of OK, as long speech is audible enough and not too much background noise is present. I even used it to transcribe Podcasts into written text, but your mileage varies drastically.

But it’s better than having nothing at all!

Sound Amplifier

Sound Amplifier is an app which uses your cabled or wireless headset, records sound and speech from your microphone, filters out background noises but amplifies speech. Additionally, it tries to keep important noises such as car horns intact.

For people like me who are having trouble filtering out background noises in noisy environments, it is useful, but the app has trouble separating different simultaneous conversations. But I think this is a hard computational problem anyway, and as above: It’s better than nothing.

Also, it works offline.

weZoom

weZoom is a magnifying camera app. What makes it different from other apps is that is has a huge set of color filters, which transform the taken picture into different monochrome schemes, such as

  • black and white
  • yellow and black
  • blue and white
  • blue and yellow
  • black and green

Why is this useful? People with certain types of color blindness might really appreciate this. For me, it’s just a very easy way to read the tiny instructions printed on meals in crappy tiny fonts, possibly badly printed, lacking contrast.

Works offline and does not transmit any data to anywhere, which is a plus as so many 3rd-party camera apps are shady pieces of software.