Advanced Voiceover Gestures iOS 8
iFocus Program
Tips on Using the Vision Accessibility Features in iOS
Advanced Voiceover Gestures
Douglas Walker
Hello, my name is Douglas Walker, and I am an instructor of access technology here at the HadleySchool for the Blind. Today we are going to be looking at using advanced voiceover gestures. We’re using the iPhone 5S for today’s demonstration, and we’re running software version iOS 7.3. Okay, so today we’ll be looking at some of the more advanced gestures onthe iPhone, but fear not. Thesesame gestures will work whether you’re using the iPhone, the iPad, or the iPod Touch. Hopefully these gestures will make navigating your idevice a bit faster and a much more enjoyable experience.
Now if you’re new to your device, before you begin trying to tackle some of these more advanced gestures, you might want to check out our Beginning Voiceover Gestures video. It really does a pretty good job at getting you up and running quickly on your device. Okay, so let’s go ahead and get started.
Now a really good gesture to know right away is the two finger double tap. This gesture makes it possible to start and stop the current action, so the two finger double tap will do things like answer and hang up your telephone, so if your iPhone starts ringing, you simply perform a two-finger double tap to answer your iPhone, and then when your phone call is finished, you perform the two finger double tap to simply hang up, and that is really handy. It makes answering and hanging up phone calls so much less stressful.
The two finger double tap will also do things like start and stop playback of audio, so if you’re listening to your music or if you’re using a book playing app, such as the BARD mobile app, the two finger double tap will start and stop the playback in those apps. This way you don’t have to go searching for that play and pause button. It can sometimes be hard to find.
All right, so let’s take a look at how this gesture works. So the last album that I was playing was one by the Beatles, and now if we perform the two finger double tap, the album should begin playing even if we’re not in the music app. Okay, so to perform the two finger double tap, you need to use of course two fingers, and you need to have them separated by about a half an inch. A good rule is if we’re able to stick another finger between these two fingers, then we know we’re just about right. Otherwise, our device is going to see those fingers together as one large finger.
Okay. So let’s try the two finger double tap. We’ll tap our screen twice with two fingers here. And I’ll do that.
(music plays 0:03:21)
And it’s easy as that. Just tapped twice with two fingers, and we simply do another two finger double tap to pause our audio, and so I’ll go ahead and do that.
(music stops 0:03:35)
And there we are. Remember that it’s going to try and play the last app that you were using. In this case, it was music app, but it could have been Pandora Radio, Spotify, or even like we said earlier, our BARD mobile app. So that is a really handy gesture. The two finger double tap will also do things like take a picture if we’re in our photos app. It will also start and stop video playback if we’re in an app such as YouTube. It will also start and stop our voicemail playback if we’re listening to our voicemails. The two finger double tap will start and stop voice memo recordings and it will also start and stop our stopwatch. So as you can see, this is a really useful gesture to know, and one that we’ll use all the time.
All right, so now that we have the two finger double tap down, lets take a look at the two finger single tap. Now, this is a really handy gesture that we’ll use to stop and continue the playback of our screen reader or to mute our screen reader is talking. That means while voiceover’s speaking, we can simply tap the screen once using that two finger gesture to pause the speech. And then if we want our speech to begin reading again or speaking again, we can just tap once with those same two fingers and it’ll start speaking again.
So let’s take a look at how to do this while we’re inapp like iBooks. So let’s go ahead and launch our iBooks app. So I will touch iBooks here on our screen.
Voiceover
Double tap to open.
Douglas Walker
And then it said double tap to open so I’ll just do a single finger double tap anywhere to launch iBooks.
Voiceover
Dropbox.
Douglas Walker
Whoops, excuse me. There we go.
Voiceover
iBooks. Library. Button.
Douglas Walker
Now, we’re in the book Winnie the Pooh, and we’ll first need the touch somewhere near the middle of our page. So that we’ll be within the text of our book here, so I’ll go ahead and touch the book here.
Voiceover
You ask.
Douglas Walker
And it read the area that we just touched there. Now we know that we’re in the text of our book because we just touched it. Okay. Once we get our book reading, we can simply tap once with two fingers to pause the speech and then once again with two fingers to get it speaking again.
So let’s first get our speech started reading here. Now we’re going to learn or we’re going to discuss how to get it started in just a minute, but first, we’ll learn how to pause and resume voiceover speaking. So we’ll go ahead and start our screen reader here.
Voiceover
You asked. They might or they might not said Winnie the Pooh.
Douglas Walker
And there it goes.
Voiceover
You never can tell with bees. He thought for a moment and said, I shall try to look like a small black cloud.
Douglas Walker
Okay, and we just tapped once with two fingers just then to pause our speech. And remember we have those fingers separated just a bit. And then we can just do that same double finger single tap or two finger single tap to get it going again, and we’ll do that.
Voiceover
Image. Then you had better have the blue balloon, you said.
Douglas Walker
And there we go.
Voiceover
And so it was decided. Well, you both went out with a blue balloon and you took—
Douglas Walker
And again, we used that two finger single tap to pause it again. Now, this same gesture will work in any text area that we’re in, so if we’re reading an article on the internet or if we’re reading an email, this gesture will work there, as well. Okay, now while we’re in our book, and we’re talking about the two finger gestures, how about we move to the two finger flick up and flick down? Now this gesture’s really nice if you’re in a text area that you would like continuously read. And it’s the gesture that we just used to get our iBook initially reading there.
All right. Since we already have Winnie the Pooh open here, we can practice this gesture here. Now two finger flick up will begin our book, our text reading fromthe very top of the page. Again, you’ll need to have your fingers split apart by about a half an inch here, and then we just simply perform a flick up using those two fingers at the same time on the screen or flicking those two fingers up the screen there, so let’s do that.We’ll just flick up the screen with two fingers here.
Voiceover
A balloon. The great thing is not to let the bees know you’re coming. Now, if you have a green balloon, they might think you were only part of the tree and not notice you, and if you have a blue balloon, they might think—
Douglas Walker
All right, and we just used the two finger single tap to pause the speech there. Now this is going to work in any text area, like I said earlier, such as the book reader like this, an email, or even a word processing document. Now a two finger flick down will begin voiceover reading from wherever we are on the page and not from the top of the page. So if we want to begin reading from the middle of our page here, we can simply touch it and then flick down with two fingers to begin reading from there.
Now we’re able to do it, to do that as well. So this two finger flick up and flick down gesture is a really handy one to know if you’d like your book to be read continuously. And this continuous reading is really handy in an app like iBooks because once the speech reaches the end of the page here, the page is automatically going to be turned and it will continue reading fromthe top of the next page until we stop it.
All right, now while we’re still in a book here, we should really go ahead and look at a really useful gesture, and this is the three finger flick to the left and right. Now, this gesture allows us to switch from one page to another, go between pages in a book like this. So let’s see how that works.
Now I’m still in my Winnie the Pooh book here, and let’s say we miss something and would like to move back to the previous page. I’m able to do this with a three finger flick from left to right here, and that’s just flicking to the right. Now, to perform this gesture, use those three fingers and just like two finger gesture, remember you want them to be separated by about a half an inch there, and then you’ll just flick the three fingers at the same time from left to right across the page there, because we want to move back to our previous page. So let’s try this out. I’ll just flick with three fingers from left to right here.
Voiceover
Whispered. Honey. But you don’t get honey with balloons.
Douglas Walker
Now, it wants to begin reading from the top of the page, so we’ll just perform our two finger single tap to pause it there. And as you can see, we are now on the previous page, and we can also move forward through our book if I perform the same three finger gesture, only we’ll flick from right to left or up left flick across the screen. And let’s try that. So I’ll flick from left, from the right to the left or a left flick.
Voiceover
A balloon. The great thing is not to let the bees know you’re coming.
Douglas Walker
And again, we had to pause it again. And we could flick again if we wanted to move to even the next page. So I’ll show you how to do that. We’ll just do another three finger left flick here.
Voiceover
Image. Hooray. You shouted. Isn’t that fine?
Douglas Walker
And that is really great, so we’re able to flick pages here. Now this also going to work to more between pages or screens on your home page, as well. So let’s take a look at how that works. We’ll first need to tap our home button down here to close iBooks. So I’ll go ahead and close iBooks.
Voiceover
iBooks. Double tap to open.
Douglas Walker
All right, and now that we’re on our desktop, we’re able to move from page to page or to our different desktops or screens here. So let’s see how that works. We just use that same three finger flick from our right to left to move to our next page. I’ll do that.
Voiceover
Page two of two. Accessible apps folder. 15 apps.
Douglas Walker
And here we are.
Voiceover
Double tap to open.
Douglas Walker
On our next page here. And we even heard voiceover announce that we’re on page 2 of 2. Now, we can use the same three finger gesture to flick from left to right or do a right flick to get back to our first page, and so I’ll show you how that works. We’ll just flick from right to, oh, excuse me, left to right here.
Voiceover
Page 1 of 2. YouTube.
Douglas Walker
And we’re back on that first page.
Voiceover
Double tap to open.
Douglas Walker
There you go. The three finger right and left flick really does help to speed things up. Now, we don’t have to find the adjustable bar at the bottom of the screen in order to switch between pages. We just use that three-finger flick left and flick right.
Okay, so while we’re on the three finger gestures, let’s take a look at one that helps us to move through lists much more quickly. And this would be the three finger flick up and the three finger flick down gesture. Now what we’ll do is we’ll go ahead and open our settings menu to see how this works. So we’ll go ahead and open our settings.
Voiceover
Settings. Double tap to open.
Douglas Walker
And we’ll single finger double tap to launch our settings here.
Voiceover
Settings.
Douglas Walker
All right. Now, here we are in our settings menu. Now, we could move through this list by simply flicking to the right. But what if we quickly wanted to move to an item closer to the bottom of this list here? Well, we could keep really quickly flicking to the right, or we could use the three finger flick up to jump by larger increments through out list here.
Now, this is just like the three finger flick to the left and to the right, only we’re flicking up and down. We’re flicking up towards the top of our screen here. Remember, we need to leave just a little bit of separation between our fingers here. So, let’s try to move quickly through our settings list here. So we’ll just try our three finger flick up. I’ll flick up with three fingers.
Voiceover
Rows 10-22 of 59.
Douglas Walker
Now you just heard voiceover announce that we’re on rows 10 there is at the top of our page. So we jumped by larger increments down the page here so we have quickly jumped down in our list. And row 10 is now at the top of our screen there. Now, if I wanted to move back to the top of our screen, I could simply perform the three finger flick down to get there, and we’ll do just that. I’ll flick down with three fingers.
Voiceover
Rows 1-11 of 59.
Douglas Walker
And there you go. Back on row 1 being at the very top of my page there. And that is how we use the three finger flick up and the three finger flick down to move us quickly through a list like this. Now, what I want to do next is to more a little farther down in the list and show you a really cool way that we’re able to jump all the way back to the top of the list quickly here, so first, we’re going to perform several of the three finger flick ups here, so and will move us pretty far down on our list, so I’ll go ahead and flick up.
Voiceover
Rows 10-22 of 59.
Douglas Walker
Great, and I’ll flick up again with three fingers.
Voiceover
Rows 20-32 of 59.
Douglas Walker
I’ll flick up again with three fingers there.
Voiceover
Rows 31-42 of 59.
Douglas Walker
We’re way down in the 30s there now, so now if we quickly wanted to jump all the way to the top, we can just touch once in our status bar. Now, the status bar runs at the very top edge of our screen up here. So I’ll go ahead and touch in the very top of our screen.
Voiceover
Tap, settings. Heading.
Douglas Walker
Touching the top status bar up here.
Voiceover
10:29 AM.
Douglas Walker
There it is.
Voiceover
Status bar item. Swipe down with three fingers to reveal the notification center. Swipe up with three fingers to reveal the control center. Double tap to scroll to top.
Douglas Walker
All right, now the very last thing that we heard our hints say was double tap to scroll to top. So if we just simply double tap single finger double tap anywhere on our screen, and we’ll do that, we’ll quickly jump to the top of our screen.
Voiceover
Rows 1-10 of 59.
Douglas Walker
All right, and you can see that we—
Voiceover
Status bar item.
Douglas Walker
Quickly jumped all the way to the top of our screen there. And it just named the time up there, which is the center of our status bar. And that is pretty great. So if we’re way down in a page or way down in a list like this, we can just touch the status bar. We don’t have to wait for all those hints. We can just quickly just single finger double tap and we’ll jump to the top of the page.
So that is how to use our three finger flick up and our three finger flick down to quickly move through any lists that we might have there. Now, this will also work well on a large web page, so if you wanted to move quickly through a web page or through an article, or if you’re in a mail message list and you wanted to quickly push up or move down through your mail list there, or even in your text message list, you could quickly move through that, so you can see that the three finger flick up and the flick down is a really great gesture to know.