London's Nearest Bus wins an award from TFL

Thanks to Geoff from Station Master App, I went for a hunt thru my spam folder and found I'd won an award for London's Nearest Bus!

Transport for London (TfL) today named the winners of a competition to find new accessible apps to make it
easier for disabled and older people to travel around the city

..

Developers were asked for ideas for new 'Accessibility Apps' which will make TfL realtime information easier
to use - for example for customers with vision impairments.

All apps use live information from TfL free of charge.

..

Best visually impaired app: London's Nearest Bus - This app allows the user to find the nearest buses and
live departure times from their location. Users can also set individual bus alerts to trigger when a bus is due.
-- TfL announce winners of accessible app competition

I was quite surprised, to say the least. I had submitted Nearest Bus nearly a year ago, and almost forgot about it!

The app was designed, like most of my apps, to meet my own need first - I wanted to know when the bus was coming at the stop I was already at. It was always ment to be a quick "get in, check, and get out" utility app.

After some feedback from a local (at the time) person who was visually impaired, I put a bit of extra work into making sure that Nearest Bus worked really well for blind people. iOS makes this fairly easy tho, and most of it was just making sure that labels were set and being read in the correct order.

If you are a developer and want more information, I have a Xamarin Seminar from last year on the topic, which talks about Nearest Bus specifically.

If you happen to live in London, you can get Nearest Bus for free on the App Store

Nic Wise

Nic Wise

Auckland, NZ