iFocus OS7- Accessibility
Seminars@Hadley
iFocus OS7 – Accessibility
Presented by
Douglas Walker
Moderated by
Douglas Walker
The Hadley School for the Blind presents iFocus Tips on Using the Vision Accessibility Features in iOS. In this installment, we’ll look at using the accessibility features.
Douglas Walker
Hello, my name is Douglas Walker, and I am an instructor of assistive technology here at the Hadley School for the Blind. Today we are going to be exploring the vision accessibility features. We’re using the iPhone 5s for this demonstration. And we’re running iOS software version 7. I’m really excited about today’s video because the vision accessibility features for Apple products are built right into the device. And that’s pretty great, and that’s what we’re going to be exploring today.
So if you’re thinking about purchasing an iPhone, an iPad, or an iPod Touch, it really is great to know that you’re iDevice is going to come right out of the box and be ready to use. Triple clicking the Home button or clicking the Home button three times is what makes this possible for people that are visually impaired.
Voice Over, which is Apple’s screen reading software will begin reading or speaking as soon as you triple click that button there, then you’re able to move right through the set up process. Now if you’re completely new to your device, you might want to check out our Beginning Voice Over Gestures video before you begin this video today. It’ll really help get you up and running with your device.
So to get to our vision accessibility settings, we need to go to General, and then Accessibility, and we’ll be right there. All right, so let’s get started exploring our vision accessibility settings. So the first thing that we’re going to do is go to our Settings icon. And I have mine placed in the very top left hand corner right there. And we’ll do exactly what it says. We’ll double tap to open this. And I’ll double tap. Again once you’ve found an item, you can double tap anywhere on the screen. So I’ll go ahead and double tap.
All right, so when we’re landed on the Settings button at the very top of our screen here, and what you have presented here is a list view. Now we can start flicking through the right to move down through this list. We’re going to be looking or encountering two different types of elements here, one of those is toggle switches and one of those is buttons.
Now toggle switches will turn on and off a switch, almost like turning off and on a light switch. It’ll turn off and on an item there. Now buttons are going to take you into a completely new list that you can back out of if you need be. All right, so what we’re going to do is go flick down to our General area by flicking to the right.
And then we’ll head on in to our Accessibility area. Flick to the right and move down the screen here. We’re looking for the General button here. And you hear that clicking every time I flick to the right to let you know that you have moved to a new item. And there it is our General button, so I will double tap on this button to activate it. And we’ll have a new list open up, so I’ll double tap.
And we’re usually placed on the Back button at the top left. Now if you double tap to activate that, we could easily move back to our previous page there. But we’re going to flick on down though this page until we find our Accessibility settings here. So heading there General. Now flick to the right until you land on Accessibility. There’s our Accessibility settings. I’m going to go ahead and double tap to activate that.
All right, so there’s our Back button there. And I’m going to start flicking to the right, and we’ll slowly move through just the vision accessibility settings today. So I’m going to flick to the right. There’s our heading. I’ll flick again. Now there’s our vision heading that let’s you know that everything under this area is going to be just vision associated.
So I’m going to flick to the right, and we’re going to land on our first vision item here, which is Voice Over. Now we’re going to come back to Voice Over. There’s a lot of stuff under Voice Over, so we’ll come back to that, so we can spend more time there. But I’m going to show you the other vision accessibility features that are here first. Okay, so I’m going to go ahead and flick to the right.
Now this is Zoom. Zoom is our enlargement software for the Apple devices, so I’m going to go ahead and double tap to activate this. And again we are placed on the Back button there that we could activate to get back, double tap, but I’m going to flick through this. There’s our heading. I’ll flick to the right again. Now I am going to double tap to toggle this on. Again this is like the switch we talked about earlier to be able to turn something on and off.
So I’ll double tap, and you’ll instantly see everything on the screen enlarged. I’ll go ahead and double tap on this. All right, so now we have enlarged the screen. I’m going to show you some basic zoom gestures to get you started. One of those is your three finger double tap and that sort of makes you jump in and out of zoom. So I’m going to show you how that works. I’ll just double tap with three fingers. And we jumped out of that and everything on the screen is now small. I’ll double tap with three fingers to get back into it. And there we are things are enlarged again.
You actually get some hints down below this, which I’ll show you in just a sec. Let’s look at that right now. Flick to the right. It magnifies the entire screen. I’ll flick to the right again. And I did that. I double tapped three fingers to zoom. And I’ll flick to the right again. Now I’ll show you what that means. You can take three fingers and sort of start dragging around the screen. Now this is really large here, so I’m going to do the next hint. I’ll show you what that says.
So we can double tap with three fingers and drag up and down to enlarge or decrease the magnification. So I’m going to hold on the next and second tap those. I’m going to double tap, and I’m holding on the second tap and start sliding my fingers down. And you see the items on the screen get smaller, and as I push up, the items on the screen get larger. So once you get where you want it, you can stop, and then when you double tap with three fingers, you go out of your zoom. You double tap again, and it takes you back to that same magnification level that you’ve set there. That’s your default at that point.
So I’m going to go ahead, and I’m going to double tap. And we have again reduced our zoom there. Now you can leave zoom on and access that at any time when you’re in other screens, so I’m going to go ahead and just leave it on, leave my zoom running there. I’m going to show you another gesture to leave the screen.
There’s a scrub gesture. That scrub gesture you take two fingers, and you go to the right to the left and to the right again. It’s scrubbing back and forth almost like you’re making a Z. And that will take you instead of having to find that Back button in the top left and activate it to get back to that previous screen, you can just use the scrub gesture to get back, and I’ll show you how that works. So I’m going to scrub, and there we went. It’s placed us back on that Back button.
I’m going to come down the screen and move us down. Okay, we just came out of Zoom. And again I used that scrub gesture to take us back to this list, so I’m going to flick to the right. We’ll keep on moving down the screen here. So Invert Colors is really great, if you have problems with glare in Pages. If you’re in an application like Pages or like Notes where you have a solid background, or if you’re in a menu like this, you can double tap and all of your colors then are then inverted. You’re black letters are now white and your white background or your lighter background is now dark, so it just simply inverts everything.
Now a place that this might now work so well is if you’re viewing images, or if you’re in Safari or a program like that because everything’s going to look very strange. And you have to play around with it to see what works best for you, but Inverting images can really help reduce that glare and eye fatigue associated with that, so I’m going to go ahead and toggle this off by double tapping. And you heard it announce that it was turning back off.
All right, so I’m going to flick to the right down to our next item. I currently have Speak Selection on, and I love the Speak Selection. We’re going to go into this and let me show you what this is. I’ll double tap. And we’re on the Back button there, so we can go back to Accessibility. I’ll flick down through this list, and we’ll look at all the items that are here. Here’s our heading. Now I could toggle it by double tapping and turning it off, but I’m going to flick on through this screen and see what we have here.
So a Speak button is going to appear in your heading. This is some descriptions about what’s going to happen. So what we use this for is in the highlighted area, if you’re in an app where you can highlight something like Pages, or if you’re in your Notes application or even in your text messages, and you wanted to highlight something and have it read, or if you’re in Safari, and you wanted to highlight an area. Once you have your area highlighted, you typically see the word copy above that, if you wanted to copy it. Well, now since you have this turned on, you’ll see it says Speak. And you just tap the little dialog box that pops up that says Speak, and it will read your highlighted area, and that’s what this is explaining.
And you can change your voices here. You can go in and change your different voices, your preferred voice there. So I’m going to flick to the right, and here’s our speaking rate heading. And you can adjust the speaking rate by flicking again. Now this adjusts the speaking rate just for your Speak selection text here not for voice over. So I’m going to go ahead and flick to the right. So Highlight Words is really great, and it’s turned on right now. This is nice, if you might have a reading difficulty, or if you have a problem maybe losing your place when you’re reading. This highlights the words as they’re being read in the highlighted area. So this is a really cool feature here, Speak Selection. This is for someone that might not be using Voice Over all the time, but just would like to have small amounts of text read to them. So I’m going to go ahead and scrub to get back to the previous page.
We’re back in our Accessibility here. I’m going to move us on down the screen. Speak Auto-text, another toggle setting here. This allows us to speak any auto-text as we’re typing. And this is a great feature visually that you see when words pop up, but what this does is as you’re typing, say you were typing in a text message, and you’re typing the word Chicago. Well, you might type C-H-I-C, and then you’ll hear it speak a little bubble pops up that visually people see, and it says it’s going to finish the word Chicago for you. And then all you have to do is press the space bar, and it will finish the rest of that word, typing the rest of that word for you, which is really nice because we’re always looking at reducing any visual fatigue, and so you’re not having to look and type all that out every time and to speed you up a little bit as well.
So I’m going to go ahead and flick to the right. That gives us a little hint there about what happens. So here’s our larger type, and I have that turned on. Now what Larger Type does is it’s going to change the font size for Apple Apps such as Mail, Contacts, Messages, and Notes. So it’s going to change the font size in those different apps, but not necessarily the headings and stuff, so it’s not going to enlarge everything. Menus and stuff like that will not be enlarged, but in the long run it might help again to reduce some of that visual fatigue, so if you just need a little bit of a bump of text size, then you’re going to want to go in and increase this text size there.
So let me flick to the right again. Now this is turned on. And this helps to make the fonts and the texts within Apple applications a little more bold for you, so if you have problems seeing the thin lines and stuff and a lot of the Apple text, you’re going to want to go and turn this Bold on here, so I have mine turned on. Now it is important to know that when you activate this one, you’re going to be prompted to restart your device to make any changes, so you need to be aware of that.
So I’m going to go ahead and flick to the right. Now I have my Increased Contrast on. Now this increases the contrast between background and foreground in some of the Apple applications, but not all of them, so I have mine turned on. I need as much contrast as possible for myself. Like I said it mainly affects just Apple applications though.
All right so I’m going to flick to the right again. So this is off. It’s reduced motion. Apple has a thing that they like to call parallax, and that’s the 3D motion that you see and it sort of makes the apps look like they’re hovering above the screen. You can turn that off, so it flattens that out, so that you don’t have that motion. Also turning this off helps to reduce the motion in text messages or in your mail messages to keep them from bouncing up and down as you move through them and stuff like that. So if that gives you a problem, you might want to turn this off, and I have mine left on I think.
All right so I’m going to flick down the rest of this list. So this On/Off Labels gives more details to the on/off switches to make them more visual here. So it just adds a little extra highlight around the area of the on/off buttons there. Let me flick to the right again. We’re about to head into our hearing area, so what I’m going to do is I’m going to flick or use my three finger gesture swipe up to get us all the way to the bottom to our accessibility short cut feature.