Jabberwocky for Android is now in Beta!

We are pleased to announce that we have started beta testing for our new hands-free accessibility app for Android! Jabberwocky for Android enables complete control of your Android device using only head movement and speech. With Jabberwocky, you can make phone calls, post on social media, download and use apps and games…and never touch the screen!

This new app is very exciting for us because of the feedback we have received on our iOS accessibility apps. People love the ability to browse the web and to use assistive speech without touching the screen. But there is so much more technology out there that needs to be accessible. Email, social media, video streaming, games…these are important to people of all physical abilities.

We on the Jabberwocky team don’t have the time to build every kind of app under the sun and make it accessible. Luckily, we can do something much better: build an app that enables you to control other apps (hands-free)!

To build such a comprehensive accessibility app, we chose the Android platform. The first reason for this is that unlike Apple, Google has chosen to fully embrace the community of third-party accessibility app developers. They’ve created a special category of app, an “accessibility service”, that can interact with the device and with other apps in powerful ways. An accessibility service needs highly elevated permissions in order to work. Only accessibility services are allowed to have such permissions because of the potential security risk. Pretending to be an accessibility service can be highly illegal, because bad actors can (and do) use this framework to build malware such as banking trojans that make unauthorized transactions.

Apple does not have equivalent support for its app developers. Sadly, this is likely due to the perceived security risk being more of a focus than properly enabling the disability community. But not enabling this support for developers is an extremely crude solution that leaves many folks out when it comes to getting the proper technology to live effectively every day. Let’s hope Apple figures out a better path forward soon...

The second reason we chose Android for our latest app is all of the recent improvements to face tracking offered by Google's ARCore. It’s never been easier to build an app that tracks faces and facial gestures, across a very wide range of devices. Some of the supported devices for Jabberwocky cost around $100!!!

So, what are you waiting for?! We'd love to get your feedback as we continue to improve Jabberwocky for Android before official release. Download it here:

https://play.google.com/apps/testing/org.swiftable.jabberwocky

Happy hands-free computing!