Ratings & Reviews for Diet, Fitness & Exercise Apps for People with Cognitive Impairments
Fat Secret
Common Accessibility Issues
Participants with cognitive impairments reported minimal accessibility issues, though inconsistently labeled or available “search” and “save” buttons made completing and confirming certain tasks within FatSecret difficult
Commentary from Reviewers
“There needs to be a search bar/function for the recipes tab, because there were so many pages to scroll through and they were all alphabetically arranged.”
“Having a tutorial, even though we didn’t use it, is helpful for getting to know your way around the app”
“Enable users to see their typed password”
“Search bar is needed”
“Provide explicit confirmation after completing tasks or saving entries”
Lose It!
Common Accessibility Issues
Commentary from Reviewers
“Show what you're typing option for password would be helpful.”
“Better or clearer wording on graphs”
“Search (button) was in the same orange as on the top of the page so [I] couldn't locate it at first.
“Less text, more graphics”
“Finding a button with dark blue text was difficult to see”
“Increase the color contrast of text on button labels”
MyFitnessPal
Common Accessibility Issues
Participants with cognitive impairments experienced minor confusion when navigating to prompted pages and buttons that were not explicitly clear in function; they sometimes struggled to find and read elements that were unnecessarily small, or had low-contrast text-to-background shades.
Participants with cognitive impairments expressed uncertainty, confusion, and lack of confidence, due to unintuitive functional and navigational elements, lack of confirmation/explicit feedback from the app after completing tasks, and distracting media and advertisement pop-ups that disoriented them while attempting to concentrate on completing prompts.
Commentary from Reviewers
“An info tab or hyperlink to instructions for how to use important app features would be helpful”
“Password input was moderately difficult because [I] couldn't see the password being entered. When selecting birthdate [I] could only go by month. [I had to] repetitively swipe by month to get to each year.”
“Guide would be nice, a 'where to go' in each area.”
“Guide would make it more helpful. 'Did you read the manual?'”
“Maybe offer the option to view screens in horizontal mode, Could be easier for someone to type or tap in information.”
Logging a food: “bar code icon (for scanning a food item) was small and difficult to find”
Setting Goals: “finding the 'hamburger' menu icon was difficult”
“Enable searching for a cardio exercise via typing in the search bar”
“Clicking the pop-ups took [me] away from the page which was confusing … and broke concentration.”
“Provide explicit confirmation”