Let’s Envision: The Gift That Keeps On Giving

When it comes to assistive technologies designed to support the blind/low-vision community, probably the most impactful development over the last decade or so has been the proliferation of what have become these powerful, revolutionary mobile apps.

I should know – as someone who is statutorily blind and has to rely on assistive technology to do most everything I need to do, in many ways I have had a front row seat to this digital transformation.

It wasn’t too long ago (the mid to late 2000’s – to be more precise) that I would have to use my prehistoric flip phone to call my work telephone up in my cubicle at Capital Area Michigan Works! to check the time on those mornings I arrived to the office too early and had to wait for the building’s security system to disable itself. I would key in my work number, hit send, only to immediately hang up after the beep to leave a new message, and then would call right back to get the time stamp on the voicemail message as a way to tell the time. Imagine that, there I was, holding a nice shiny digital clock in my hand that couldn’t do the most basic of text to voice functions, read me the time. Instead, I had to resort to this insane system of using the technologies at my disposal, in this case, my not-very-smart mobile phone and our office’s VOIP-based phone system to figure out whether it was 7 a.m. yet so I would know whether I could use the keycard system to enter the building without accidentally setting off the alarm.

Admittedly, I am a self-described creature of habit and someone who has historically been risk averse to change, a somewhat pessimistic outlook grounded in my past experiences and years of observations that the well-founded intentions and hopeful promise of new technological solutions to, once and for all, address the problems of the disability community, aren’t always compatible with the reality of the everyday challenges we face as users of assistive technology. Things always sound great on paper, but the allure and novelty quickly wear off when in practice, the expected user experience falls well short of what you think you had been advertised. This is something that people in the blind community have had to deal with for years, and now with the popularity of things like virtual assistants, everybody else is getting a little taste of this--just think of all of us blind people and our struggles the next time you find yourself yelling at your Alexa or your car’s integrated “hands free” communications system, when your basic voice commands don’t quite work like they did for the actor in the TV commercial.

For these and other reasons, I continued to stubbornly stick with my outdated technology (i.e. my circa 2006 flip phone) into that next decade, even after the first smartphones had started arriving on the scene. 

Finally, around Christmas time of 2011, my wife was upgrading her phone and somehow convinced me to take the plunge into the smartphone end of the pool, and I got my first iPhone, an iPhone 4S. I practically knew nothing of my new iPhone or any of its built-in accessibility features when the salesperson at the Verizon store in the mall rang us up and activated our phones, other than a bare bones tutorial explaining how to use the home and power buttons, and a similarly superficial overview of the “voiceover” feature that they had gone into settings to switch on for me. But less than an hour later, as we sat there eating our lunch at Cracker Barrel (don’t judge) I quickly started to learn the iPhone’s user interface, figuring out, on my own, through trial and error, what combinations of clicks and multi-finger swipes, taps, and gestures perform the various functions. This was nothing short of amazing, up to this point in my relationship with assistive technology I had never encountered something that was so intuitive, so easy to use.

My astonishment only grew after I started downloading my first purchases from the Apple app store, including what would become the first of many accessible apps specifically designed for the blind/low vision community, things like iHandy Level and an early (walking) GPS application called APNI GPS which was invaluable for navigating the maze of city streets, finding specific building addresses, etc. when I was still working downtown.

A few years later I would upgrade to an iPhone 6s, and eventually to the iPhone SE that I am currently using, and along each step of this evolutionary process, Apple has continued to improve its accessibility features, while simultaneously increasing the capabilities of its next generation devices. This has proved to be the fertile breeding ground for the emergence of a new crop of developers and companies who have burst onto the scene to begin introducing one amazing application after another.

I say all of this to provide context for this next statement…

In my opinion, the Let’s Envision app is arguably the best, most versatile of any mobile application I have come across thus far.

The “Welcome Page” on the Envision app.

Now, I have actually written about Envision on multiple different occasions on my "Tales of the Reluctant Blind" blog and through our related social media posts on Facebook and LinkedIn.

I actually did a product review of Envision back in April 2020, and from time to time I have embedded short videos in some of my other blogs to demonstrate Envision’s robust text to speech and real-time OCR capabilities, such as my February 17, 2021 blog titled “Back in the Game” so if you have been following along, you know I am a big fan of their product.

So, when I received a generic  email notification asking whether I would be open to scheduling a phone call to speak with one of their customer support representatives about my experiences with the app, I was more than happy to oblige.

I wouldn’t normally act on this sort of unsolicited request, but I can say with confidence that the Envision app is one of the most transformative pieces of technology in terms of helping me regain some of my independence, so I guess part of it was that I just wanted to be able to share this with the people who had made this all possible. I use Envision almost every day, for both personal things like reading mail, playing board games, etc. as well as in my professional capacity as an accessibility consultant, QA tester, and blogger. 

And for the most part, that was it, I just wanted to be able to share, to let them know how appreciative I was, and continue to be for their product—I honestly had no other expectations, no  hidden agenda for doing what I did.

Then, the other day, when I was checking messages in my junk folder, I found this email from the Envision customer support representative informing me that I had been selected as one of the winners of their telephone survey giveaway and would be receiving a lifetime subscription to the Let’s Envision app!

I was already a big supporter of Team Envision, so a free lifetime subscription to their app was just more icing on the cake.

Thank you Envision for selecting me as one of the winners of the lifetime subscription promotional giveaway, and thank you for all you do to support the blind/low-vision community and for continuing to do your part to leave your print on a more accessible world. I hope to repay your generosity by maybe using the money I would normally have to spend on my annual renewal to gift a Let’s Envision subscription to another blind/low vision user, who I know, based on my own experiences, will benefit tremendously from having access to this transformative app.