LivingWriter: Write Anywhere

I am blind and have been using Scrivner for a while, but having to use it with dropbox is sometimes a bit janky so I tried Living Writer. I can use a combo of large type, voiceover and braille display in my work. Most things I can get to work to a large degree in some way. Living Writer is hands-down the most inaccessible app I have ever used in my memory. Its almost as if not only did they not even try and not think about blind users (which is common) but they went out of their way to make it work horribly. Either that or the programmers must be completely incompetent. Voice over does not work in the app AT ALL. Its a no go the second you open the app. All you get is the beep of death. With voiceover not working, that takes out braille displays, switches, and other AT that depends on manuevering with gestures, buttons, eye gaze or third party bluetooth AT devices. But wait! There’s MORE! They also seemed to have turned off dynamic type which allows you to chenge aspects of the font to your own preferences and the app font is teeny. It has a limited workability with zoom magnification, but once you start typing with zoom on, the whole thing crashes. I’ve never seen an app work so terribly on ALL AT fronts. It pretty much gives the impression that these developers hate disabled people and don’t think we might have anything to write about. BTW, janky dropbox saving aside, I’ve never had an accessibility issue with Scrivner. ZERO stars, if possible.

I purchased a subscription and do enjoy using Living Writer a lot for its features—but it has a long way to go and a lot of bug fixes before it is where I would like it. The Bad: The phone app itself is glitchy and needs some work. While it is useable, the cursor will do some weird stuff, when I click the compose button after not using it for a bit it frequently freezes up and requires me quitting the app or it will move the screen to a completely different part of the passage, instead of popping up every time I type the first letter or two of an element’s name it would be nice if it just automatically turned text that matches an element’s name or alternate name into a link for it, I also would strongly prefer that when I hit the back arrow button when I am on a passage that it goes to the manuscript list of chapters/scenes/passages rather than all the way back to the main menu of manuscripts. The Good: syncs across app and website (very good, especially when comparable apps like Scrivener don’t allow for this), you can stash blocks of text, ability to make “elements” that you can reference at any point where it is mentioned (i.e. a character’s name)

I’ve been using LivingWriter for a little over 6 months now to write a novel. There are features of this application that are great to use like logging how much you’ve written per session, organizing writing per chapter, and having the ability to organize and create detailed notes for your writing. However there are severe problems with LivingWriter’s newest update and persistent problems that the developers haven’t taken immediate action in fixing. Updating a UI for quality of life is all well and good. But still having issues where hours of your writing in a session completely disappears is inexcusable to sell to a consumer. Small features in this version like page count, and the ability to reorder chapters within your manuscript have also been completely removed or hidden in some capacity. Which were features really selling the product for me as a user. It isn’t that LivingWriter is a bad product with no redeeming qualities. But the fact that these paramount issues have not gone immediately corrected by it’s staff means that there is a real disconnect when maintaining this product for its user base. Especially considering it’s user base has to PAY for a S U B S C R I P T I O N to use it. There aren’t many other choices out there for writing software. But I’d suggest anyone look for alternative apps that are better tailored to your writing needs before immediately settling on this one.