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Hearing your gauges — readings spoken aloud

Get the depth, the hour meter or the coolant temperature read out loud, so you can keep your eyes up and your hands on the wheel.

Every gauge in theONE now says two separate things: what it is, and what it currently reads. Turn on VoiceOver and the depth tile says “Depth, 8.5 feet” instead of spelling out the abbreviation. Units are spoken as words — gallons, feet, knots, volts, degrees Fahrenheit — and a course of 005° is read as “5 degrees” rather than “zero zero five.”

The important one: when a tile is in alert it says so out loud. On screen an alerting tile turns red, and it also swaps its icon for a warning triangle and draws a heavier border, so it reads without colour too. Neither is something a screen reader can read to you. Now the reading ends with “in alert,” so an engine over temperature announces itself whether or not you are looking at the phone.

A tile with nothing to report says “no reading” rather than reading out a dash. A tank with no sender fitted is not broken — it just has nothing to say.

Steps

  1. Turn VoiceOver on

    iPhone Settings → Accessibility → VoiceOver. Most captains bind it to a triple-click of the side button (Accessibility → Accessibility Shortcut) so it goes on and off with wet hands.

  2. Point at a tile

    On Mission Control, touch any telemetry tile. You hear the tile's name, then its reading, then whether it is in alert. Tiles that drill in also say so.

  3. Hour meters and hero counts

    The hours rows on Mission Control and in the Briefing read as the engine's name followed by its hours, plus ‘near service threshold’ when it is close. The four tiles at the top of Mission Control — Upcoming trips, Ready Now, Open observations and Maintenance — read their label and then their value the same way. Ready Now reads a verdict, READY, CAUTION or HOLD, rather than a number, and it is titled Vessel Check and reads CLEAR, CAUTION or ALERT while a leg is in progress.

  4. Position

    Position is read as “38.9943 degrees north, 76.2750 degrees west.” With no GPS lock it says “no fix” rather than inventing a position — the same rule the screen follows.

  5. What theONE says without being asked

    With VoiceOver on, theONE speaks these the moment they happen, wherever you are in the app:

    • An MOB pin — "Man overboard pin captured" and its coordinates, or "Man overboard pin failed" and why.
    • The anchor dragging — "Anchor dragging" and how far she is from the set point.
    • A new AIS alarm — "AIS alarm:" and what it is, and how many more came with it. The phone gives a warning buzz with it too. An alarm that only updates is not read again.
    • A toast — with "Warning:" or "Error:" in front when it is one.
    • The undo banner — "<what you did>. Undo available.", and "Undone" when you take it back.
    • Going offline — the offline banner's own words, "Offline. Working locally." or "Local network only. No internet.", and "Back online." when the connection returns.

    The MOB pin, the anchor and AIS alarms go ahead of other speech. While an MOB is active, the steer-back line reads its bearing and distance in words and keeps up as they change.

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