Play Books on an iPad mini for low vision users
Welcome to this short video demonstrating some of the low vision accessibility options of the Play Books app on an iPad mini.
Narrator:
As a low vision user, if I want to use the Play Books app on the iPad, you may think that I just turn Zoom on and then go into the book and start reading it. The problem with that, of course, is that I would need to do lots of scrolling around the screen in order to read my book.
So before I go into Play Books what I've done is set up Zoom so that I can use three fingers, double tapping, to turn it on or off. I'm going to go into Play Books and change some of the settings there, and then I'll be able to turn Zoom off and read it quite comfortably.
So when I open a book, as you see the text comes up and it's quite small and I would need to scroll around quite a lot in order to read it even at this low level of magnification. Obviously at larger levels of magnification that would be even more tricky.
But, if I tap the screen, in order to get the menus up and then tap the double Aa button, these are the general settings that you can use to change the visual settings.
As well as being able to change a "theme" - I can change the background so that it's less glary than the default, and I could also (if I wished) invert the colours so that I had white text on black - I can also choose a typeface.
I have a preference for sans-serif, so I'm going to choose Verdana. And, while that's changing in the background, and the book is going to take on the Verdana font, I can also change the text size and make the text itself bigger. It will still wrap within the page - you will see the effect in a moment when I come out of this menu and turn Zoom off.
It does take a while for the settings to take effect, and I can just tap that plus button a few times to increase the magnification to some level that is comfortable. And when I've finished, I tap outside the menu to close that menu and go back to just having the book on my screen.
I can now double tap to turn the magnification - Zoom - off, and I've still got quite large print - I might need to make I a bit bigger than that!
The line spacing between the lines changes automatically as I change the font . That's unfortunate - it means that if I get the font up to its largest size I get quite large gaps between the lines.
But the main thing to bear in mind is that I can make the font quite a lot larger and therefore comfortable to read without the Zoom magnification being available. I just swipe through the book in the usual way.
I hope you found this very quick introduction to some of the low vision accessibility settings in Play Book useful. Thank you!
This video used an iPad mini running iOS version 7.0.4 and the Play Books app version 1.6.4.9543.
Logo:
RNIB - supporting blind and partially sighted people
rnib.org.uk