Hi Zwifters,
Great to be included with a login/account in this forum/community, but as the YouTube video shows, as a blind keen cyclist, the complete lack of VoiceOver IOS compatibility prevents me even signing in to the app.
I’d absolutely love to join in with a community virtual ride, pedal a Zwiftopia route, any route, and have some access, but being blind, the Zwift app developors have made no allowance to make the app accessible.
There is a whole pool of tandem blind cyclists out there, or just blind cyclists that safely exercise on static trainers, so it’d be wonderful to participate in this Zwift world too!
Ok, couldn’t post a YouTube link here, but if you search for the following on YouTube it will come up.
Trainer Road - the only true Smart cycling option for Blind cyclists
The objective video shows my experience with Zwift, RGT, WattBikeHub and Trainer Road …
Quite shocking difference between TR and the rest.
Thus far, there has been no response regarding the prioritization of accessibility of Zwift. Regarding the accessibility survey, there has never been any attempts for follow up or release of findings from either the survey or focus groups the UI research team conducted between 2021 and 2022. I have tried to reach out to Tim from that team through both these forums and his email, with no response.
Shameful and so short sighted of such a global organisation not recognising the captive audience, potential extra customer base they could absorb so readily by simply extending functionality to include that portion of society that are physically unable to cycle in the real world, where the virtual world of cycling is just a few man-hours of software programming away.
Making Zwift open to the blind, or those unable to ride a real bike in the real outdoors would have a massive transformation to those users lives, potentially life changing!!
Just so sad the company leaders, software architects and Zwift marketing hasn’t the clear vision to see how they’re excluding so many.
Does it really need legislation to catch up to enforce a broader access to features, services to everyone in a population, not just the able, sighted?
The best we are going to be able to do is to keep these conversations open and drawing more and more attention. From our perspective, not even having accessible title, login, and main menus is a deal breaker,. Unfortunately more of the people on Zwift o not know a blind or low vision person, so they cannot even fathom what its like to live in our cleats.
Personally, I use Zwift about 5 days a week via VoiceOver’s Screen Recognition to access the platform and then rely on the Companion app for info. This is far from a reasonable option to use the platform, but its my way of trying to demonstrate that our community is very interested, and it will only grow as eSports and officially sanctioned US Cycling and other governing bodies conduct cycling and paracycling events.
Unfortunately I see this as an ultra endurance advocacy race, where we need people raising this issue here on the Zwift forums, public media, and to Zwift itself, vs the numerous conversations occurring on the various social media blindness groups and such.
