Hello folks.
I found an app in the app store for ios called media remote. I
didn't have a supported device, since it's a sony product, but a
quick trip to goodwill took care of that little problem. I picked up
a blue ray player for 46 bucks, and hooked it to my network at home.
It took a little of sighted assistance to get things going, which is
unfortunate, because it seems sony has a ways to go on this app to
make it usable by voice over users. We can get to major things like
favorits, main menu, home screen, and even select the device we'd
like to control, but that's about the extent of it's usefulness to
voice over users, which is a real shame, because this is the only app
other than the lg remote app which claims to work with lg devices I
found that doesn't require a piece of hardware to be plugged in to
the ipod/iphone/ipad to make it work. This one uses your home
network to send the commands to the sony device, and I'd wager it'd
be possible to build an accessible version of the app easy enough,
though I guess things like dvd/blue ray menus may not talk, but at
least the up/down arrows could be made to work, along with the play/
pause/submenu options. You can view settings of the device once it's
selected, and you can get into the options screen, but much more than
that requires sighted assistance, which is a real shame. I had
extremely high hopes for this app, and it's no exaggeration to say
I'm majorly disappointed at the moment. I'm not complaining about
the lack of a sony device, we needed one anyhow, and I guess sony is
as good a brand as any, so having to buy a sony blue ray player
wasn't a problem. I'm more disappointed that the app wasn't a bit
more accessible. I didn't expect full access, but I was hoping for a
bit more than I got. However, the app is free, and if I can figure
out how to send feedback to sony on this app, I'll certainly do so,
this could be the perfect way for us to control our sony devices if
the app was more accessible. I like this one, because it doesn't
require any additional purchase to work, which is what I was after.
So, if someone could try the lgremote, and see how that one works
(don't have any lg devices) I'd be interested to know how that one
works.
One interesting I did find though, Sony also has an audio app just
like the media remote, that handles audio equipment, allowing you to
configure which speaker is being used for sound output, even if it's
not in the same room you're in, you can configure it to send output
to all speakers at once, or configure each speaker by itself, and
multiple idevices can talk to different speakers if you so desire. I
was extremely surprised to see that when I loaded this app, it found
our xbox 360 on our network, and offered me the ability to control
the xbmc application, to control what music plays, and create play
lists and so on. We don't have any music on our Xbox, so this didn't
work, but it sure was interesting to see that the sony app worked
well with it anyway.
I was able to see when music was playing (we tried playing stuff at
random just to see if it would see the songs). It didn't, but we
weren't playing them from the hd, which is how you need to play them
to have complete control I think, apparently this sony app doesn't
handle streaming feeds. Nonetheless, it seemed to be accessible,
which was a nice change from the media remote app which was only
slightly accessible.
The xbmc app for the ipod/iphone may work too, but since we didn't
have the media center running on the xbox, it wouldn't even get past
the initial screen that told me about the app, so I guess that's
another point in Sony's favor on this one. :)
So, just so I don't confuse folks, to summarize, I tried two sony
apps, media remote which didn't work well enough to allow control of
the blue ray player, and audio remote which seemed to work fairly
well, even where the xbmc app didn't. Both of these apps are in the
app store, both are sony, and as far as I know, will run on ipod,
iphones, and ipads.
Thought some would find this interesting. Hopefully, sony can be
made aware of the accessibility issues, and even more hopefully,
they'll choose to fix enough of them to make the media remote app
usable by us, that would just rock, especially since this blue ray
player we picked up for cheap didn't come with a remote of it's own.
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