Texts on this website are managed in English. All other languages are translated by artificial intelligence. If a sentence seems odd, please contact support@bimover.ch.
Last reviewed: 6 September 2026
Vadum Accessibility
Vadum is built for pilots who cannot see the screen, or see it poorly. This statement was written on 6 September 2026 and checked against the app as built on that day. The date belongs to the statement: it says when we last went through the app and confirmed that what is written here still holds.
Everything under What works today can be checked in the app itself, without an account: launch it once and it shows a sample briefing with the same structure as a real one.
What works today
- Reports are read as sentences, not as letters. METAR, SPECI, TAF and SIGMET are turned into whole sentences before anything is displayed. The plain text is the normal view for everybody, not a mode you switch on.
- There are two texts, one for the eye and one for the ear. On screen a report says LSZH; spoken, the same report begins «Zurich, Lima Sierra Zulu Hotel». The raw report is spelled out group by group by the ICAO alphabet, and it is spelled out in the text itself rather than left to the voice engine to guess.
- The spoken sentence carries a language tag, with country and not only language, so an English bulletin inside a German briefing is read by an English voice.
- The important part comes first. A spoken report begins with the aerodrome, the flight rule category and the age, then the hazard. What is merely worth looking up is moved out of the main sentence and into the rotor under More content, where the age is weighted so that VoiceOver still speaks it straight away.
- Four languages, on both levels. The weather vocabulary and the interface text are both complete in German, English, French and Italian, with no gap in either. The language follows the device.
- Colour is never the only carrier. The flight rule category is a shape, a word and a colour: four distinguishable shapes, the word next to it, the colour only in the capsule behind. Error messages carry a symbol and a sentence as well as the red.
- Custom actions where a gesture would be the only way. On a report, Read out the raw report and Read out the plain text switch between the two. In the settings, Move up and Move down reorder the products, so the drag gesture is never the only way to do it.
- Two rotors. Headings are marked, so the heading rotor moves through the briefing by section and through the airspace bulletin by page. A second rotor, Aerodromes, jumps to every place an aerodrome is mentioned. Inside the raw report you can move character by character, inside the plain text by word.
- The hidden web view is out of the accessibility tree. The view that talks to skybriefing.com is invisible, cannot be operated, and is removed from the accessibility tree in three places, so VoiceOver never wanders into a foreign web page, or into a password field, underneath the app.
- No fixed font sizes. Every piece of text uses a system text style, so it grows with the text size set on the device. Report text is never truncated: unlimited lines, and a height that follows the text.
- Targets are at least 44 points on a side, which is Apple's minimum rather than the smaller figure in WCAG, because this app gets operated in a cockpit.
- The contrast settings have an effect. Card fills and borders read Increase Contrast and Reduce Transparency and get stronger and thicker when either is on. A group boundary is never carried by a hairline alone.
- Signing in without typing it out. The sign-in fields accept pasting and the system password AutoFill. There is no puzzle and no arithmetic test.
- A dimmed button says why. If the briefing form is incomplete, the app names the first field that is still missing instead of leaving a disabled control with no explanation.
- Things that happen on their own are announced once. A failed sign-in, a finished briefing: one announcement per event, never a flood. When a sheet opens, focus moves to its heading rather than staying behind it.
- Loading states carry a sentence, not just a spinner. A turning ring says nothing at all when motion is reduced.
- Report text can be selected and copied, in both the plain text and the raw form.
- An expired report gets no verdict. The app says that it is expired and stops there, rather than judging stale figures.
- There is an automated check. Seven cases drive the built app on iOS on every pass, among them one that walks the interface and fails if any button lacks a name.
Where it stops
These are limits of the app as it stands, not a roadmap. Nothing here is promised away.
Weather charts have no description
GAFOR, the low-level chart for the Alps, surface pressure, QNH, wind and temperature arrive as finished raster images with the labelling burned in. There is no text source behind them from which a description could be derived, and we do not invent one: a description guessed from a picture would be worse than none where flight weather is concerned. The app names each chart and shows it, and it can be enlarged full screen with buttons as well as with a pinch. That is all it can do with them.
The airspace bulletin is passed on as it comes
The DABS is fetched as a PDF and shown page by page as a picture with the wording next to it, one element per paragraph. That wording is English, it is not translated, it is not interpreted, and it is read by an English voice. Its first page is a map with no text layer; the app says so and does not describe the map, because it cannot read it. Only today's bulletin is available. Tomorrow's cannot be shown.
Some text is passed through unchanged
Sections that are running text rather than coded groups, such as the light aviation forecast, are shown and read in their own wording. The list of flight plans is read as the provider writes it: the aerodrome identifiers in it are not spelled out, and the off-block time appears in the provider's format.
Nothing works without a network
Vadum keeps no briefing on the device. Quit the app and what you were reading is gone. Without a network you reach nothing except the sample briefing that ships inside the app, and that sample has a fixed issue time and must not be used to prepare a flight.
Two things you cannot set
There is no language switch: the app follows the device, and falls back to German if the device is set to something outside its four languages. There is no setting for the rule set either: which flight rule categorisation applies is read off the aerodrome identifier, and where that is not possible the app computes under SERA.
What our own checks do not cover
The automated pass runs on iOS. The Mac runs the same source, but there is no automated interface check on it.
Two things that pass cannot see, and we say so rather than counting them as covered. Whether VoiceOver really adopts the language tag of a sentence as the voice language can only be measured by hand: the harness sees the label, the value and the trait of a control, not the language identifier behind them. And whether an element hidden from the accessibility tree is truly unreachable cannot be read out of the view tree either.
The report card and the flight plan row are laid out for the largest accessibility text sizes and checked at them. The app as a whole has not been walked screen by screen at those sizes, so we do not claim it.
One part is not ours
Vadum operates your own account at www.skybriefing.com. Signing in, choosing and displaying happen in our interface, and we answer for that. How accessible that service is when you use it in a browser is not ours to decide.
What you can hold us to
The app is built against WCAG 2.2 level AA. That is the technical yardstick we accept each view against. The European frame of reference is EN 301 549, which in turn points to WCAG.
What we do not claim is an audited conformance. Nobody outside has looked at this. It is a commitment we made ourselves, and you may hold us to it.
If something does not work
Write to support@bimover.ch with the word accessibility in the subject. It helps to say which view it was, which assistive technology you use, what you expected, and, if a report was read wrongly, the raw report itself. Everything else about the app is on the support page.
What happens then: you get an answer from a person. If the fault can be reproduced, we tell you whether and when it will be fixed, and if we are not going to fix it, why. If we cannot reproduce it, we ask. Accessibility reports are tracked as defects, not as wishes.
Vadum is not an official flight preparation. It replaces neither the official briefing nor the responsibility that rests with the pilot in command.