WOWK 13 News

08/24/2024. Pros: The stories, pictures, and live streams are very nice on my iPad. Cons: Having to endure a lengthy ad before every news story opened is irritating. I will use the competitor’s news more and only look at 13 if I want to see more to a story.

The 13 News app has a few major issues with blind accessibility. While it does work with VoiceOver as far as reading almost all text and controls, it has important usability issues. The full-screen ad which appears at app launch is difficult to close because all interactive elements are so small and close together, necessitating a lot of pixel-hunting. Swiping up from the bottom as prompted apparently doesn't work with VoiceOver enabled. Additionally, toggle switch options are split such that reading an option won't give its status. It is necessary to manually slide over to the actual switch to learn its state, which punishes inaccurate gesturing and leads to considerable trial and error when configuring news alerts. Even reading stories is problematic as continuous reading with VoiceOver results in jumping from the story text to the footer and navigation bar at the end of a page. It is necessary to scroll to the next page manually and then to restart continuous reading from the top of the page. Finally, the frequency of alerts makes the app a battery hog. Even with only three or four alert categories enabled, more than a dozen alerts per day are typical. The problem is likely overlap between alert categories, which only more granular options or more discretionary story classification can resolve. This app could be a good news source but needs a lot of work for the disabled.