2013-08-14-iFocus3
Seminars@Hadley
iFocus 3: Tips on Using the Vision
Accessibility Feature in iOS
Presented by
Douglas Walker
Amy Salmon
Moderated by
Larry Muffett
August 14, 2013
Larry Muffett
Welcome to Seminars At Hadley. My name is Larry Muffett and I’m a member of Hadley’s Seminars Team, and I also work in curricular fairs here at the school. Today’s seminar topic is iFocus3: Tips on Using the Vision Accessibility Features in iOS. Our presenters today are familiar ones to many of you who are regular participants. Amy Salmon and Douglas Walker are veteran Hadley instructors and very knowledgeable technology gurus.
Today they’ll be sharing their knowledge about the vision accessibility features in the iOS operating system. However before I formally welcome Amy and Douglas and turn the microphone over to them, I want to share a little piece of information with you all today. We’re trying something different today and I think it’s something that’s going to become more of a regular practice on this. As you well know, we’re mixing a lot of different technologies here: access technologies, iPhone technology, computer technology.
And we’ve had some incidents in the past where the technology just didn’t mesh up as well as we would like. So what we’ve done today is we’re going to have the best of both worlds for you. Amy and Douglas have both recorded their presentations but they’ll be here live to answer your questions. So I think we’ll eliminate some of the technology problems that we’ve had in the past but still allow that good feedback and good interaction that people enjoy so much from these seminar.
So without any further ado, I’m going to turn it over. I believe Douglas is going to be our first presenter and he’s going to talk about VoiceOver gesture so I’m going to turn the microphone at this point over to Douglas.
Douglas Walker
It is hard to believe that we’re already in iFocus number 3. We’re going to be covering four more topics today. Our first topic today is beginning VoiceOver gestures. VoiceOver, of course, is Apple’s screen-reading software, and a screen-reading software gives a person that’s blind or visually impaired the ability to totally use the iDevice by speaking what’s on screen. And that’s pretty great for us.
So by learning these beginning gestures, you’ll soon be moving through your iDevice just like a pro. All right, so I’m going to talk a little bit about the orientation first. We have our iPhone in portrait view and the home button, of course, is at the bottom of the screen. That home button allows us to leave any application and get right to our desktop. And, of course, the interface is just a piece of glass that we’re going to be acting with.
And we’re going to be learning these gestures so that we can interact directly with this glass to be able to move through the device. The items on the screen are laid out in a series of rows and columns very similar to desktop and the bottom row is called the dock, and that’s where we place our favorite apps are usually placed down there. Now the first gesture that we’re going to be looking at is the tap gesture, and that is simply placing your finger on the screen.
So I’m just going to start in an open area that – what you hear this auditory queue that you get when you place it on the screen. That little beeping sound is what you hear, and then if you come in contact with any type of application as you’re moving around, you’ll hear something like this. All right, that’s another queue for another gesture we’ll learn just in a second. So that’s a great way to sort of just explore the screen and look around the screen.
Just by dragging your finger around, you can learn what’s on your desktop bringing in any application, but it’s not the most efficient way. But it’s a good way to sort of quickly jump to areas because I know that my phone’s in the bottom left so I can touch there. And I know my music’s in the bottom right corner so I can hopefully get to that just by touching in those areas, and you can do that quickly in an app too.
The next gesture we’re going to learn is the flicking gesture, and that’s going to allow us to more systematically move through an app. So when you enter a new application or you’re on your desktop, flicking through the screen will help you to move just a little more systematically. So I’m going to touch the top left item on our screen, and every first item in the first column in the first row there. And now flicking is very similar to like if you had brush or sand, that’s the way I like to explain it, and you wanted to brush it off a desktop.
Well, that’s the same motion you’re going to use when you flick across the screen, and I’m flicking from left to right; and you just barely glance your finger across the screen when you flick. All right, so I’m going to start flicking to the right, and watch what happens. I moved to the next item. So now I’m on the second item in that first row and I’ll flick again.
All right, so I’m going to flick to the right again. Now I’m on the fourth item in that first row which is the last column in that row. If I wanted to flick again, it’s going to jump to the second row, the beginning the very first item in that second row. So I’ll flick again, and you get a little bit of different auditory queue that tells you you’ve jumped to the next row.
And I can continue flicking to the right. It’s very similar to reading. You move from top left to right and down as you keep flicking down the page. I’m going to flick one more time. Right, so we’re in the third item in that second row there. So we’re just moving from top to bottom and left to right. I bet you can guess what will happen if I flick to the left now which I’m going to do. So I’m going to flick to the left.
You start moving backwards up the screen. All right so that’s flicking to the left, and again I just moved back up to the previous row, and I’m on t he last item in that first row there. So if you flick forward, you’re going to move down, and if you flick to the left or backwards you’re going to move back up the screen. So that’s flicking. So we’ve done the tap gesture and flicking gesture, and we’re already starting to move through the device.
The flicking gesture, like I said, is really good if you’ve entered a new app and you sort of want to see everything that’s in the app. You can just flick all the way through that app, and sort of figure out what’s there sort of like pushing the down arrow and keep moving through the screen that way.
All right, so you keep hearing the gesture mention; it says “Double tap to open.” Well that is the next gesture that we’re going to look at. So you can open any application or open a button by just double tapping on the application. I’m going to move in to our settings. So I’m going to – I know what that does on the screen because I’ve explored my screen, going to touch settings here.
Look it gave us that queue to double tap, so I’m going to do that. I’m going to double tap on our settings. And again, I can double tap anywhere now that I’ve activated that button. I can double tap anywhere to jump into that. Right, now I’m placed on a heading at the very top of the screen and I’m in a list view now. So it’s a list that goes all the way down the screen here.
And now there’s a couple of items that we’re going to encounter as we go down this. One is going to be a toggle switch that you can double tap on to turn on and off; very similar to turning off a light switch, and there’s a button. So when I double tap on a button, it’s going to activate that button. It’s very similar to clicking if you’re a mouse user or pressing the space bar or enter if you’re a JAWS user.
All right, so we’re going to start flicking to the right. I’m going to use that flicking gesture to sort of move down the screen here; and I’m looking for the general button. And because our general area is where our accessibilities area is and that’s where we’re going to head because I want to show you something really cool. It’s under accessibilities.
So I’m going to flick to the right. And I’ll keep flicking, I’m flicking again. Look out for general. Now it’s going to say “button.” There you go. So that’s a button. So we know if I double tap on that, and again I can double tap anywhere on the screen; it’s going to activate that and give us another list view. It’s going to open another list: our general items.
And it’s showing me a back button there in the top left hand corner if I wanted to go back to that previous page, but I’m going to move down this page to the accessibilities area. So I’m going to start flicking to the right again. So our heading, we usually have a heading in the top center of each page here. Flicking to the right. Now we quickly move down the screen just by using a three finger flick up.
So I’m going to do that to quickly get us to the bottom of the screen, quickly get us down. I want to touch somewhere close to the middle of the screen here. All right, now I’m going to start flicking again. I’m flicking. There it is. And if the button – so if I double tap, it’s going to open up our accessibilities here. So I’ll do that quickly, and I’m placed on that back button. It can get us back to our general page there, but I’m going to keep flicking down this until I find VoiceOver.
And there it is. It’s a button so I can double tap to activate it. We’re moving to our VoiceOver stuff which should be a great place that we can practice our gestures here. So I’ll double tap, and there’s that back button in the top left again. I’ll flick to the right. Keep flicking down this page. We’re going to get some hints here. Yeah, I’m going to flick to the right again, and these are gestures we’ve already learned.
I’ll double tap. All right, so there’s that three fingered swipe that I did earlier, but this next button is the one I’m looking for so I’ll flip to the right and there’s our
VoiceOver practice button. I’m going to double tap to activate that. All right, so now I’ve been placed on a screen. It’s just a – really a blank screen with just a done button in the top right hand corner for when I’m done with this page.
So what I’m going to do is I’m going to just use this blank areas to practice these gestures that I’ve learned so far. So I’m just going to touch the screen. Okay, so it gave us some hints on what to do. I’m going to touch the screen again, practice that touch gesture. Cool. So I’m going to flick to the right. Cool. I’ll flick to the left now. All right, so the next one we’ll double tap.
Okay, so those are the ones we learned, and of course, we did that three finger flick up that we didn’t spend much time on. Okay, so this is a really nice place to be able to go and practice all your – a safe place to go to sort of practice all those voice over gestures. Now you can get a list of all the gestures. You can always Google and find the iPhone or the iPad manual there online. It gives you a listing of all the VoiceOver gestures there.
Or you can go to the Hadley website at www.hadley.edu and follow the resource link there and you’ll find it under a link called Additional Course Materials. All right, so I’m going to exit this by hitting that Done button, using that double tap that I learned to exit this. Okay, and touch the Home button down here at the bottom and get us out of the settings, and there we are back on the desktop.
So it didn’t take long to really start being able to quickly move through the device. All we really used are three gestures. So hopefully you found this to be useful today, and you now have a safe place to go and be able to practice all the gestures that you learned today and many, many more gestures. So that’s pretty great. All right, I’m going to go ahead and turn the microphone back over to Amy for our next topic.
Amy Salmon
Thank, Doug. Okay, next we’re going to learn how to place and receive a call using your iPhone. This may seen like a fairly simple process, but for beginning iPhone users, it can be a bit intimidating and confusing. So my goal today is to remove the fear of making and receiving calls on your iPhone.
What you need to do first is locate your phone app. I keep mine located in the lower left corner of my dock so that it appears in the lower left corner no matter which home screen I’m on. Whether it be home screen one or home screen four. So I’m going to go locate my phone app and then single finger, double tap to open it. When your phone app opens, it’s automatically defaults to whatever screen you were last in when you used your phone app. I was last in the keypad so that’s the screen that’s currently being displayed.
You have five screens or tabs available in your phone app, and they’re located across the bottom of the app or the bottom of the screen. From left to right, these are: favorites, recents, contacts, keypad, and voice mail. And I’ll show those to you right now starting from left to right at the bottom of your screen. These are all features that you can use with your phone, different functions.
I don’t have time to get into each of these in today’s seminar, but I do encourage you to explore these on your own to learn more about what each one offers. And we will be covering them in more detail individually in future iFocus seminars. For the purpose of today’s seminar, we need to be in the keypad screen or tab which is the one I currently have focus.
So in the keypad screen, if you put your finger in the top left corner, you’re going to be placed in an area that is the [TLLA] phone that you’re currently calling or the phone number you’re currently calling. I don’t have a phone number entered yet, so it reads to me ‘blank phone number.’ Just below that you have a standard telephone keypad layout with the top row being row keys 1, 2, 3; and the bottom row being star, zero, pound.