2011-07-21-Going Ape for Apps
Seminars@Hadley
Going Ape for Apps: Hot New Accessible Apps
for Your iDevice
Presented by
Amy Salmon
Korey Singlton
July 21, 2011
Billy Brookshire
Welcome folks to Seminars@Hadley. Our topic today is Going Ape for Apps: Hot New Accessible Apps for Your iDevice. I’m sure that is why we have got so many people here to check these things out. Your presenters today are really incredible presenters. You’re going to really enjoy them. We’ve got Amy Salmon who is a Hadley instructor, who really knows these devices well. She scares me sometimes with all of the different ones she uses at the same time, sometimes multiple devices. You know she knows what she is talking about.
With her is Korey Singlton who also knows this field very well from Georgia Mason University. He’s the assistant technology initiative manager there at Georgia Mason. You can see he’s well versed in the field also. So as not to take more of their time I’m going to hand the microphone over and Amy, I believe you’re starting today. Amy, here you go.
Amy Salmon
Actually, we changed the order a little bit on you Billy and didn’t tell you. But we’re going to start with Korey, so I’m going to hand the microphone over to Korey.
Korey Singlton
Sounds good, thanks Amy, thanks Billy. We really appreciate everybody coming out today. I know it’s early for some of you. It’s actually late for Amy and I. It’s the end of the work day for us. But we’re really excited to be here and actually presenting for you and hopefully taking a lot of good and informative questions from each of you.
The first thing I’m going to talk about today is exactly what is an app? The first thing I’ll say before I actually get started is that Amy and I do not work for any of these companies and we are not necessarily getting paid from any of these companies. We love a lot of these apps that we’ve played around with. There are a lot more out there that we actually have not gotten our hands on. We’re still tapping into a lot of new applications as well. But we are not necessarily endorsing these things. We don’t work for these companies, although it would be nice if they paid us but I understand if they don’t.
Let’s talk about first what exactly is an app. An app is actually just a nickname for an application. So really think of an app as a program on your phone that makes it easier for you do some of the things that you do every day. For example you can use apps to say, check weather or you have gaming apps. You can play games on your phone. You can keep track of your calendar or your schedule, anything like that. Really it’s just an application on your phone that does not have as much functionality as say an application on your desktop or on your laptop computers. But it does give you enough functionality to do some of the everyday tasks that we like to do.
I’m going to turn it over to Amy. Amy is going to demonstrate exactly how to locate, download and install an app to your iDevice. Amy, I’ll turn it over to you.
Amy Salmon
Thanks, Korey. We are going to try to keep this presentation a little more fluid. We’re going to be demonstrating how to locate an accessible app for your iDevice. I’m going to do a demonstration of how to locate, download and install an app on your iDevice. I’ll be using my iPhone for the purposes of that demonstration. And then Korey and I are going to go back and forth and talk about the apps we like, the ones that are getting really positive reviews and ratings out there in the field for accessibility. Then we’re going to open it up and hopefully get some information from all of you about what’s working for you, what you like. Maybe you’ve got some apps we’re not familiar with.
One of the websites that I go to quite frequently for information on my iDevice, about new iDevices out there and applications is a website called Applevis.com and that is spelled A-P-P-L-E V as in Victor, I- S as in Syria dot com. We will be putting a resource document for this seminar that will be posted with the audio file for the seminar on the Hadley website. So go to Hadley.edu and go to past seminars page. There will be a resource file with all of the websites, links to all of the apps that we’re going to be discussing tonight as well as additional resources. You’re going to hear some audio in the background because my speakers are kicking out the text chat in the room too.
Going to applevis.com and that’s where I am right now. I’m using JAWS for Windows screen reader. That’s the screen reader that we will be using. When you get to Applevis’s website you have a lot of options here but the one that I go to the most frequently is they have an app directory. If you come down their website you’re going to see it in their main menu a list. Right there is their app directory, so we’re going to go there. On their app directory page you can actually search for accessible apps and read the reviews for them. And then some links right here on the front that are recommended apps, and most currently reviewed and reviewed apps.
That’s the dropbox app that allows you to record voice memos to this DropBox. News Folio, and I was looking at this one earlier in the week. Listen to the review on this one, so there you go. If you wanted to look up an app and see if it is truly accessible you could look here, look at that app and say “Oh, well they’ve already reviewed it and it’s not getting that great of reviews. Maybe I don’t want that one. I’m going to go look and see if there is another one out there.” Google+ which is the new Google Facebook; it’s Google’s way of competing with Facebook. There you go; it’s fully accessible but a little challenging in terms of usability
So you can go through this list of the most currently reviewed app by just navigating using the H key in JAWS to jump by [Heather] Read to Go, which is one we’re going to touch on, on our list. These are the top ones that they’re ranking. And then you fan just arrow down, so there you go. You have your reviewright there. When we look at categories, how can I find an app in the category I’m looking for? You go back to the menu. You can look up app deals, news and podcasts which I do listen to quite a few of their podcasts. They have quite a few guides as well.
I want to get down here and show you the categories you can look for. Actually I’d like to go look at this. VisWhiz is one of the ones that Korey and I have on our list. VisWhiz is getting a lot of publicity and a lot of coverage in the field. It’s a really cool app. Biz Whiz, we’re going to go there and take a look. Once you find an app in AppleVis.com and you determine that it is accessible. The ratings are good. You select the link for that app. You go to the page that gives you more description on that product. Here is the description of AppleVis. I’m thinking this could be really cool if say I live alone and I pulled something out of my pantry and I didn’t know what it was. And it was reading well for me using my scanner or my OCR. I take a picture of it. I ask the question “What is this?” I get an automatic response back from a human or an automated server telling me that that is a box of Rice-a-roni. Now I know what I’m dealing with.
AppleVis is getting a lot of great coverage out there. It’s been really positively received in the field. And it is free. Some apps cost you .99 cents, some a $1.99, some $4.99, some $19.99. This one happens to be free. So we’re going to take this opportunity to then switch over to my iPhone and we’re going to go look at Viswares on my iPhone. You go to the app store on your phone or your iPad, whatever device you’re using, iTouch. You open the app store. I’m going to search and the search button on the app store is actually down on the bottom of the screen in, if you come to the bottom of the screen it’s down near the lower right corner. And there is your search button. I’m already in the search field so I’m going to come up here.
I was actually doing that earlier. I downloaded Google Search, which is another one we’re going to talk about when we go through apps. Google Search is an app you can actually download and install on your iDevice that provides an automatic link to Google through your iDevice to do Google searches, so you don’t have to go through Safari, locate Google, then do your search. The really cool thing about Google Search that I like is that you can actually voice input the search parameters. So when I was playing with this earlier today I went to Google Search and I went to iPhone resources. All I did was go to Google Search, tapped on the button that says “voice search” and spoke, when it beeped I said “iPhone resources.” It beeped back and my search results were displayed on the page. It’s a really cool tool for using Google and not having to navigate through all the garbage that is typically in your Google web browser
We’re going to go back to search here. Let’s look at the Google on mine, Google Search.I’m going to delete Google Search and we’re going to type in “VisWhiz.” And then now it’s going to go over and press “enter” for search. Give it a second to search for that app and there it is. It’s right there, the first item that came up in my search result. There is the search where I typed in “VisWhiz.” The first item below there is VisWhiz. I’m going to double tap on that to go to VisWhiz. If you wanted to read about it I can keep going down the page and read about the app.
We’re just going to do the installation here so I’m going to go back to the “Free” button and double tap on that. Then you come back to another screen and you get an “Install” button. I double tap that install and it’s asking for my password for my iTunes account. Even though it’s a free program you still have to have it authorized through your iTunes account. I’m going to type in my password here and it’s installing. It’s installing VisWhiz on my phone right now. Let’s go see if we can find it. I find the easiest way to find things on my phone, since I have over 80 apps on my phone, is I got back to the home screen; I’m going back to my home screen under searching my iPhone, and I’m going to type in VisWhiz. Then I’m going to go down, double tap on VisWhiz, and that’s the app. That easy; locate, download, install and run the application.
I’m going to release the microphone and turn it back over to Korey to talk about a critical question we get asked all of the time. “I downloaded an app. I don’t want it anymore. How do I get rid of it?” Hang on and I’ll release the microphone for Korey.
Korey Singlton
Thanks, Amy. I think that is a very critical question we get ask a lot, how do I get rid of an app I’ve just download. It’s actually very easy to do. I’m going to demonstrate very quickly. Basically what you’re going to do is—I’m actually just navigating through one of my pages and I want to get rid of “Yoga Stretch.” The first thing I am going to do is double tap and hold.
When I hear “Moving Yoga Stretch” what that is actually showing me visually is that all my icons that are third party icons, meaning the icons that were not installed on the iPhone or iPod touch or iPad when I actually purchased the device, they are actually kind of wiggling and they have a little X next to them. What that means is that I can actually delete the icon. I’m going to go back to Yoga Stretch and find Yoga Stretch. It asks me to double tap to delete so I’m going to double tap and now I’m actually just going to swipe to the right until I get to the delete button.
Once I get to the delete button I’m going to double tap delete. Now my icon is actually gone and that means the app has been uninstalled from my device. Actually when you double tap and hold and move things it is kind of delete mode, everything is going to stay in delete mode until you hit the “home” button and get it out of that setting. That’s a very easy way to remove apps that you’ve downloaded. I know a lot of people get confused by that the first time I was trying to do it. But that’s an easy way for you to actually remove applications.
So again, the first thing you will do is double tap and hold until you actually hear the icon actually say move whatever icon it is that you have highlighted. You can actually double tap and hold anywhere on the screen. It does not have to be specifically on that icon. And then once you actually move, you can navigate back to that icon. It’s going to say the icon’s name and then at that point in time it’s going to say “double tap to delete” and once you double tap then you can navigate to the delete button. Double tap again and then you remove the icon.
Now Amy and I actually wanted to start discussing a lot of the applications that are out there. There are many applications that are out there and we want to go through a lot of different ones that are out there. We’re not going to really demonstrate many of them but what we will do is talk about them briefly, some of our favorite ones. The ones that are kind of up there on our list that we have been playing around with lately.
The first one that I’ll actually touch on is the new zoom reader app from Ai Squared. It’s a $19.99, actually from app store. It’s kind of pricey compared to many of the apps out there that are .99 cents or a $1.99. It is completely accessible using voiceover. I’m going to preface this buy saying this app, I’ve played with it a little bit, and it’s a work in progress. There are still some issues. I kind of felt like I had to take just the right picture in order to get it to actually scan and produce the OCR correctly. I noticed when I was actually zooming; using the zoom slider bar that sometimes the slider bar was in the way. The OCR was unreadable at times. Some of those issues were of there but this is actually a really good start. It’s a combo screen magnification application and it’s also a portable electronic reader through it OCR capability.
You have about six different color filtering modes in addition to true color. So you have black on white, white on black, blue on yellow, yellow on blue and again black on yellow and yellow on black; a lot of different features out there in terms of high contrast settings for a lot of users who benefit from that kind of tool. You can also customize the synthesizer text size, speech rate as well. You can actually convert any of the images. When you take a screenshot you can then convert that image into text that can be read aloud.
The other nice piece about that particular tool is that it reflows the text. If you guys are familiar with zoom text at all, when you actually use the doc reader tool in zoom text, basically what it does is it reflows the text so that you don’t have text actually flowing off of the left or right-hand sides of the screen. It actually sets it up kind of like a teleprompter so that all you have to do is move the texts up and down in order to see everything. That’s a similar feed setup in the Zoom Reader app where it actually reflows any text that you’re going to start reading with the OCR tool. It’s a really, really nice feature.
In my opinion, it’s an app that is really more opposed to those who are totally blind. I say that because the OCR is not quite as good as it should be right now. But it is heading the right direction. In terms of magnification you can increase and decrease magnification up to about 4x zoom using the slide bar that‘s on the left hand side of the screen. The buttons are nice, large, easy access buttons. You can actually purchase more voices and in different languages as well. I believe the additional voices that you can purchase cost about $2.99 each.
It’s compatible to the iPhone4 and IOS. It has to have at least IOS 4.0 or later. One thing I will mention, actually yesterday they just, no it was two days ago, they came out with some newer improvements. There is now version 1.0.1 and they’ve actually added some announcements which will indicate when the camera changes orientation. With the first version that came out they didn’t have that so people would kind of get confused sometimes if image would change. But you can actually have it indicate whether you’re changing orientation or the landscape or portrait.
The other nice feature that’s out there is that for a lot of individuals who were scanning a text, non English languages, sometimes the OCR would strip any special characters that you may need. For example in Spanish if you have any kind of accent marks or things like that it would strip those kinds of characters. So now the OCR engine will no longer strip those special characters. So that’s a nice feature for anybody who is actually trying to scan texts of a different language.