RNIB Smartphones - transcript
Andy:
Hello and welcome to this short video about the accessibility features of mainstream smartphones in February 2013.
Smartphones are such an essential piece of our everyday life that it's hard to imagine what we would do without them. We use them for everything; waking us up in the morning, listening to music, reading e-books, browsing the web, sending emails and we still occasionally use them for sending messages and for actually phoning people and speaking to them face to face.
I'm joined today by Robin and Neil who are two smartphone users who make use of some of the accessibility features of these phones in different ways. So Robin, if I come to you first, what do the accessibility features of these phones allow you to do?
Robin:
Well for me as a person with low vision, it really is all about flexibility and having the ability to customise the appearance of the screen.
Andy:
And Neil, if I come to you, I know you're a big user of these devices but in quite a different way to Robin.
Neil:
Yes, I use a screen reader. One of the most important things to me, I guess, is the ability to be able to go and buy one of the devices and actually take it home and set it up out of the box myself.
Andy:
So we're going to move on now to look at the built in accessibility features of each of the mainstream choices that you'll find on the high street today. We're going to start off with Apple's iOS operating system. I'm going to go to Robin first to look at the settings that they have for partially sighted users.
Robin:
Thanks Andy, so if I start off first of all with zoom. It's really simple, we can turn it on or off and once we've turned it on, the magnification can be activated with a three finger double-tap on screen. Double-tapping on screen, that turns magnification on and then double-tap again, it turns it off. Once you've done that a few times, it's really simple. Double-tap and drag up to turn the magnification on and increase it and then also to drag down to decrease it. So magnification, it's important to say, works across the operating system, it'll work in all apps.
Second feature down here is the large text feature. So it allows you to have large fonts across mail, messages, calendar, contacts and notes. So this will allow you to have either a 20 point font, right up in steps through to 56 points. What's nice about that is it will allow you to have a large text experience without necessarily using magnification.
We've also got another feature which is called invert contrast. So there's three really simple features that will be helpful and they're all built into the operating system.
Andy:
So Neil, coming to you. Before we talked about that sense of excitement that everyone has when you first get a new phone and you're taking it out of the box. You mentioned that you can set it up independently with speech, could you explain to us how that works?
Neil:
Okay, so when you take your iOS device out of the box and turn it on, initially it should come up with the setup screen. To turn on speech, all you is you treble-click the home button - voiceover on - it will automatically start speaking to you and then you can work your way through the setup process. I'm just going to show you some of the ways that you can move round the screen. You have two options, really; you can slide your finger over icons or you can swipe left to right to move along or you can go back the other way.
Andy:
So moving on now, I've heard a lot about the accessibility of Android devices and I'm going to come to Robin first of all. We're going to talk about the low vision settings that they've added in recent versions.
Robin:
We're going to take a look at version 4.2, Jelly Bean. In the settings menu, under display, we've got the opportunity to change the font size and we've got the option to use small, normal, large or huge. Now in addition to that, and similar to iOS, we've also got a magnification gesture. We bring on magnification really simply by firstly turning on and then activate it by using a one finger triple-tap. Once we've moved in, magnified, we use two fingers to drive around the screen.
Andy:
So Neil, coming to yourself, I'm going to ask you this question again about taking this new, shiny Android device out of the box. How do you get it speaking to you?
Neil:
Right, well this again should be a simple setup process. You press two fingers on the phone and it asks you to wait and hold if you wish to enable. Okay, so basically all I've done there is put two fingers on the screen, possibly a little distance apart from each other and it's asked me if I wish to enable accessibility mode to keep hold of my fingers there, and up it comes. Now you're at the setup screen.
Andy:
You showed us before how you navigated around the iPhone, can you now show us how you navigate around this Android phone that you've got?
Neil:
Okay, again this is pretty similar to iOS. I can place my finger on the screen and I can drag it around and it'll tell me what items are under my finger or I can alternatively swipe to the right or left and again, it will tell me what icon is activated. We have another option in Android though; if I go into settings, for example. Now I know this list, for example, has 22 items, so if I quickly want to get from top to bottom, I can expand the list kind of like a sighted person would do it, but with two fingers instead of one. It expands the list so I can see toward the bottom of it.
Andy:
So moving on now, I'm ashamed to say that I'm behind the technology curve. I've been using a Windows Phone 7 device for about a year now, which has no accessibility features whatsoever. But I know there's been some improvements in Windows Phone 8 so I'm going to pass over to Robin now and he's going to take us through what those improvements are.
Robin:
That's right, thanks Andy. So Windows Phone 8 has a number of features integrated that will help people with low visions. Firstly, there is a font size adjustment which you can slide from left to right, so you can take the font up to really quite a large size and that will make it much easier to read. There's also a high-contrast mode which we can turn on and off and then there's also what we call the magnifier, Windows magnifier. I can action that by double-tapping with two fingers this time and then come out of it by two finger, double-tapping. Now like iOS and Android, we can also adjust the size, the magnification level, and we can make it work so that it suits your individual needs.
So a bit more flexibility in the platform, but a bit more work to do, it has to be said.
Andy:
Neil, unfortunately we can't come to you with this phone at the minute because my understanding is there is no speech.
So I'm really pleased that for all of the phones that we had here today, we were able to talk about their accessibility features to at least some degree, but I'm also conscious that there seem to be some gaps. Guys, what's missing? What needs to be done next?
Robin:
So for me, accessibility needs to be across all the platforms. So every mobile phone platform should have accessibility built in, out of the box.
Andy:
I completely agree with that. Neil, do you have anything you would like to add to that?
Neil:
I would like to see developers paying a little bit more attention to documentation and providing that and making it easily available.
Andy:
Okay, thanks for that, Neil, and thanks both for your time today. I've found this session really useful and I've certainly learnt a lot.
If you'd like to find out more about how RNIB can help you make your operating system or mobile device more accessible to blind and partially sighted people, please email us at .
Voiceover:
RNIB, supporting blind and partially sighted people.
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