Category: Mobile

Fitbit Exercise Tracking is Confusing

Author Rachele DiTullioPosted on Categories MobileTags ,

I’ve had a Fitbit Zip for almost three years and I use the iOS app to sync the data from it. This app lets you track exercise that wasn’t captured in full by the step counter. I use this to add info about weight training and aerobics at the gym.

The active minutes, steps, and distance often do not add up when I add one of these exercises manually. The other day, I took a moderate 1 mile walk but forgot to start the tracking feature in the app. After my walk, this is what my activity looked like.

screenshot of fitbit app showing 24 minutes of activity, 5319 steps, 2.26 miles
Fitbit activity before logging exercise

My stats showed

  • 5,319 steps
  • 2.26 miles
  • 24 active minutes

After I added in my walk manually, the stats updated in an unexpected way.

screenshot of the Fitbit app showing 5,796 steps, 2.45 miles and 0 active minutes
Fitbit activity after adding a walk

My stats changed to

  • 5,796 steps
  • 2.45 miles
  • 0 active minutes

What? I can’t figure out what Fitbit is trying to do when I log exercise manually. The distance and steps shouldn’t change when those are precisely what the tracker tracks. My active minutes dropping to 0 is what I find most perplexing. How would adding exercise ever reduce active minutes?

By way of comparison, here are my stats from yesterday before and after manually logging 50 minutes of aerobics.

side by side screenshots showing discrepancies between calories and active minutes
Fitbit comparison when logging aerobics

Here we see the number of calories burned dropped by 102 while active minutes increased by 10. Again, what? I wasn’t able to find any information from Fitbit about how its software calculates these numbers but I think it’s safe to say, something doesn’t add up.

Twitter Adds Alt Text Authoring for Some Users

Author Rachele DiTullioPosted on Categories MobileTags

I posted recently about how sharing images through services like Twitter are often inaccessible to users with visual impairments because they lack meaningful alt text. In its March 28 release (version 6.50 for iOS), Twitter now provides some mobile users the option of including alt text. (No word on when the feature will be available for website users.)

To enable the ability to add alt text to your posted pictures from within the iOS Twitter app:

  1. Go to your profile page
  2. Tap the settings (gear) icon
  3. Choose the “Accessibility” option
  4. Turn on the “Compose image description” option
  5. Save your settings

The first time you insert an image into a tweet, you will be prompted to “Describe this image for the visually impaired”.

Twitter image prompt to describe this image for the visually impaired
Screenshot of the image upload prompt

Tap the “Add description” button to provide a meaningful explanation of the contents of the image.

screenshot of the field to type in the image description for a watermelon pinata
Screenshot typing the image description

Looking at the source code via the website, we can see the image contains the description within the alt attribute.

<img style="width: 100%; top: -72px;" data-aria-label-part="" src="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ceu_z_PW4AEchnB.jpg" alt="Watermelon piñata broken open">

For more information on this feature, check out the Twitter Support article Making images accessible for people on Twitter.

Waze, what is that bar on the left for?

Author Rachele DiTullioPosted on Categories In Real Life, MobileTags ,

I’ve been using Waze for a few months now, and every now and then, a bar shows up on the left side. I’d glance down and see that it showed “something” was estimated to happen (or last?) for a few minutes, but I could not figure out what. We have a hands-free law here, so I could not legally take my phone off its holder and look at it more closely.

photo inside a car of an iPhone in a phone holder, displaying the Waze app map
Waze app in my car

The screen is probably 18″ from my eyes and I wear polarized sunglasses which makes the app even harder to interpret when glancing down for fractions of a second.

It took using Waze as a passenger to see that the bar’s label also had the word “Jam” (traffic jam?) in a light blue font. However, other times I’ve been driving and the bar has no label, so I’m still not sure what it’s for!

screenshot of the Waze map with a status bar on the left side that has no label to indicate its purpose
Waze left bar with no label

Design Recommendation

This is an easy one. Change the font color to white and bold it so that the word “Jam” is just as visible as the time estimate. And always include a label to indicate why the bar is there.

Waze map showing an orange status bar with "Jam 7 minutes"
Screen capture of the Waze map screen