It’s interesting I don’t see anybody has suggested this yet, but this app is unfortunately not fully accessible to those who are visually impaired or blind. I’m a legally blind person who uses my phone a lot as a tool for independence and accessibility. I appreciate the bearable app a lot because it is the best app I’ve found for tracking health data. and as a person living with multiple disabilities and chronic health conditions this is important to my life. But, I’m in the market for an accessible app. As apps should be considering we are in 2024 people. Apple has built in accessibility features but this is reliant on app developers and companies to design their apps to be able to function with these built in features.

For me, it is important that apps are compatible with apples large font capabilities. It is also important that I be able to turn on and use voiceover when I need. In order to read the screen. Now, designing an app that uses graphs to display health information is difficult to make fully accessible, but using things like AI could make this type of information accessible to the blind community. With integrated AI, a person could theoretically ask it about a correlation, a trend or about what happens on a specific day and be given that exact feedback in text (readable with voiceover hopefully) or verbally.

When apps are not accessible to ALL people, it harms those who are most vulnerable. Tracking health conditions is a lot more complicated for those with print disabilities; apps could help overcome these barriers to tracking health conditions if they are built to be fully accessible.

The final thing I will note accessibility wise, not only is it important to be compatible with smartphones built in accessibility tools, like apple accessibility, but it is also important that apps have their own settings to be tailored to accessibility needs (which actually improves usability for all users). This would be similar to how your app provides the ability to have dark mode on or off within the app. I would like to see you also add the ability to increase font sizes, ability to change the font type (options including open dyslexic, Arial, Verdana) and ability to increase contrast. It would also be of benefit, if AI was integrated, for users to be able to add data using spoken/written plain language. For instance, instead of going from spot to spot to insert data section by section, a person would instead speak or write in plain language sentences the information they would wish to add.

Example: on March 25th 2024 I drank a lot of coffee and had a bad nights sleep due to my cat being in the room. I also had a one hour nap and had low back pain around noon. My mood was about a five all day and I felt quite optimistic.

These improvements would help ensure more equitable access to your app for a wide range of disabled people including those who are neurodiverse, blind/ visually impaired, other print disabled people and developmentally disabled people. Ultimately though, these improvements would benefit all users and their ability to tailor the app to meet their unique needs and use the app in the way they need.

Finally, I fully believe that disabled people should not have to pay full price for technology we are not able to fully access. Although you have a raffle to allow potential access to free subscriptions, this is not a guarantee. If you say your mission is, “to make health optimization accessible for everyone and to help people both manage and prevent chronic diseases”, then you need to step up and actually make you’re app accessible to all people. Vulnerable, marginalized and oppressed groups of people, like disabled people, have a much higher incidence of living with chronic health conditions and yet have the least amount of access to resources to mane positive changes in our lives due to barriers, inaccessibility, discrimination, stereotypes, inequity, etc. Be a leader and make a difference for those who need it most by ensuring your app is fully accessible to all users or add a subsidized rate plan for print disabled users (upon presentation of need, at least 50% subsidized).

I would love to be able to fully support an app that is designed to be customizable in the way that I track health data as well as provides important correlations. Thank you for your time.