2014-02-07-iFocus 5 - Vision Accessibility in iOS7
Seminars@Hadley
iFocus 5: Tips on Using the Vision Accessibility
Features in iOS7
Presented by
Douglas Walker
Moderated by
Larry Muffett
February 7, 2014
Larry Muffett
Welcome to Seminars@Hadley. My name is Larry Muffett. I’m a member of Hadley’s seminars team and I also work in curricular affairs. Today’s seminar topic is the fifth of our series of technology seminars focused on idevices. Our presenter today is a familiar one to many of you who are regular participants. Douglas Walker is a veteran Hadley instructor and technology guru. Today Douglas is going to be sharing some new pointers with you on using idevices more effectively. Now without any further ado I’m going to welcome Douglas. Douglas, welcome.
Douglas Walker
It is so great to be starting our second year of our quarterly iFocus series. It has been a cold beginning to this year for sure. Well, for most of us anyway. I thought it would be a good idea to begin today’s seminar by taking a look at our weather app. We’re going to be looking at the weather app that’s built right into our iPhone. It really is a great tool for being able to keep up with today’s current weather as well as the weather for the next few days. Let’s go ahead and get started by launching our weather app. We’ll flick to it.
We’ll single finger double anywhere on the screen to launch it. Now you noticed that my weather opened showing the Nashville weather. That’s because I’m currently in Nashville. It really is cool that the weather app will display the weather for your current location. You don’t have to do a search to find the weather for wherever you are. If we touch close to the top of the screen here you will be read the current conditions again. I’m going to do that.
You’re also prompted to double tap for an additional information. I’m going to do that to show you how it works. I’ll single finger double tap now. That’s some really good information. If I single finger double tap again you’ll be presented with our original information. That’s pretty great. Let’s say we want to know our hourly forecast. We can flick to the right to move through the screen to see that.
If you keep flicking to the right the hourly forecast will be given for the next 12 hours from your current time. We’ll start flicking to the right to see how that works. That’s going to be laid out across the middle of the screen from left to right. I’ll flick to the right. I’ll keep flicking to the right. I’ll flick to the right and move across this line. You see what happens if we continue to flick to the right here. Let me flick one more time.
I flicked again and it’s going to give our daily forecast and a list below that hourly forecast there. We’ve got our hourly forecast and now we’re in a list of daily forecasts for the next five days. Let me flick to the right and we’ll move through this. I’ll flick again. I’ll flick again and then one more time. If I continue to flick one of the last elements on this page, at the bottom of the screen, is an adjustable bar. I’m going to flick to get to that.
This is great because you can program your favorite cities into the app and then if you flick up or down on this element you will move between each of your favorite cities here. You’re going to be given all the same information for each city we encounter. I’ll go ahead and flick up and show you how this works. I’ll flick up to move to our second city.
Here we are in Chicago. I’ll touch at the top of the screen to show the current conditions in Chicago. Just like the previous screen I can just begin flicking to the right to get the hourly and then the daily forecast for Chicago. That is really great. Let’s say we want to add another favorite city to this, we’ll take a look at how to do just that. We’ll go back down to the bottom of the screen and find that adjustable bar. Now flicking to the right will give us two more buttons. Flicking once will place us on a Yahoo! button. This is more of an advertisement for Yahoo! here because the weather app is powered by Yahoo! Weather.
I can single finger double tap on that Yahoo! button and be taken to the Yahoo! site but we don’t want to do that. We’re looking for the last button on this screen which is the edit cities button. I’ll flick, we’ll find the Yahoo! button. We’ll pass by it. I’ll flick again and we’ll find the edit cities button. If I single finger double tap to add another city I can do it right now. I’ll go ahead and single finger double tap. Now we’re placed in a list of our cities here. We’re prompted to be able to rearrange these cities. So I can move these cities around in this list if I wanted to. However, we’re going to leave them as they are and we’re going to concentrate on just adding a city here.
I’m going to flick to the right to move through this list. There’s our second city, we’re promoted again to move that around. Remember that we only have two cities here. So if we continue to flick through this page, we’ll encounter a couple more settings at the bottom. I’ll flick to the right and there is the first button there that we encounter. As prompted, if we single finger double tap we can change our temperature units from Fahrenheit to Celsius there but we’re going to leave ours on Fahrenheit for now. I’ll flick to our last setting here.
That places us on our add city button. Now if I single finger double tap I’ll be placed in a search field where I can search for our favorite city to add. I’ll go ahead and do that. We’re able to search in a few different ways. We can search by typing in the city. We can type in the zip code or the airport location here in this edit field here. How about we add New York City to our list. At the bottom of our screen we now have a standard corded keyboard that we can use to enter the text here. We’ll go ahead and type “New York” in this edit field. We’re in an edit field at the very top of the screen. I’ll go ahead and type “New York.”
There’s “New.” We’ll type “York” and there is New York. Now as we type a suggestion list started dropping down below that edit field at the top of the screen. What I’ll do is I’m going to touch the heading at the top of the page and that’s just below our time up here. I’ll touch the heading and that’s our heading there, start flicking to the right. We’ll end up in our search list. Let me start flicking here. There is our search field that we just type. We just typed the word “New York” and I’ll flick to the right again. Now I can activate the clear text button, if I wanted to clear what’s in our edit field there and begin another search. We’ll go ahead and flick to the right.
There’s a cancel button if we wanted to cancel out of this. We decided we didn’t want to add another city now. When I flick again we’re going to be in our search results list. I’ll flick to the right and there at the top of my list is New York, New York. I’ll flick through a couple more just to show you how this list looks. I’ll flick again, now we can just flick back to the left and go back up the list to New York, New York. That’s what we’re wanting to add anyway.
Since this is the city we want to add, we can just single finger double tap and it will be added to our favorite cities list. I’ll go ahead and single finger double tap. Here we are back on our list of favorite cities. I’ll flick to the right until we reach New York to show that it’s been added to our list here. I’ll flick again and there is New York. If we want to view the full weather for New York I can just single finger double tap to do just that.
Now we’re back in our full screen mode where we can move between our three cities that we have here and get all that information that we got earlier. We can do this in a couple of ways. I can either go back to the bottom of the screen to find our adjustable bar and flick up or down. Or I can either use a three finger flick to the right and left, which for me is a much faster way. I’ll show you how to do that. We’re going to use three fingers and we’re just going to flick to the right here. We can move between our cities. You heard a sound that prompted that we need to cross. We are not on Chicago screen just like we were earlier and I’ll use three fingers to flick to the right again and we should be in Nashville.
It’s as easy as that. That’s about it for how to use the weather app. It’s a really handy app and I use it almost every day. Another app that I use a lot is my clock app. This is another app that’s built right into our idevice. I tend to get a lot of questions about the clock app so I thought we might look at a couple of parts of it today. First we’ll look at setting a timer and later in today’s seminar we’ll look at how to set an alarm. Let’s go ahead and launch our clock app to get started.
First we need to get out of our weather app. I’ll tap my home button to get out of the weather app. We’ll go ahead and find our clock app on our desktop. We’ll single finger double tap to launch it. We’ll begin by just exploring our clock app interface here. We have four tabs across the bottom of our screen. Single finger double tapping on any of these tabs is opening up a totally new screen that we can interact with. It really is like having four apps within one app because each tab down here does a totally different time related task.
As I said, these are along the bottom edge of our screen from left to right. I’ll touch in the bottom left-hand corner to activate the world clock. We see that the world clock is already selected there. I want to flick across this to our different tabs. That’s our alarm tab. Flick again, there’s our stop watch and if I flick one more time we’re on our timer tab there. Now the world clock tab is currently selected but since we’re sitting on the timer app tab right now we can just single finger double tap to activate it.
We have a whole new interface in which we can interact now. We’ll start by exploring this screen we’re on, the timer screen. At the very top of the screen just below the time up there is our timer heading. I’ll go ahead and touch up there. Now we can start flicking to the right and when we do we’ll land on a picker item. This is really interesting, so let’s hear what it has to say about the picker item. I’ll flick to the right.
This is exactly what it sounds like. We’re able to flick up and down to pick our desired time. Now our hints are turned on also so we get all those great hints on how to interact with the picker item. So it tells you that you need to flick up or down to change the time there. We’re on our hour picker item right now. We can flick up and change our timer if we like. How about we set our timer for two hours for the hour time. I’ll flick up and there is one. I’ll flick up again, and we have a two hour timer. We’ll go ahead and flick to the right and move to our minutes part of the time here. There’s another picker item that we’ll interact with here.
Let’s go ahead and flick up and change it from 30 to 45 minutes here. We stop on two hours and 40 minutes there. We flick one more time. When we flick we’re going to land on a place where we can pick the type of sound that we want associated with our timer. I’ll flick to the right. I have mine set on “stop playing” but if I single finger double on this you are going to have all kinds of different sounds that you can select from. Bongs and gongs and all different kinds of sounds, then you just activate the save button in the top right hand corner when you’re done.
I already have my “when timer ends stop playing” selected. This I really love because it gives us the ability to have our timer act as a sleep timer. So when our timer has finished counting down our audio app is going to stop playing. I use this all the time. This works really great in our music apps like Music, Pandora or Tune in Radio. It also works really well with our BARD Mobile app or any other book reading apps. It really does make for a super nice sleep timer. So that’s where I have mine set on instead of a sound right now.
I’m going to flick to the right and we’ll find our start button. Now that we have our time set we can single finger double tap on the start button here to begin our timer. When we activate our start button we’ll hear it turn into a stop button but we’re not going to do that right now. We have one more button for our timer and that’s the pause button. I’ll flick to that and it’s just to the right of our start/cancel button. It’s a pause button there. This makes it really handy if we need to stop our timer for any reason and then start it back.
Let’s go ahead and flick back to the left to get back to our start button so we can begin our timer. I’ll go ahead and single finger double tap to get our timer going. You heard it turn into a cancel button. I said stop button earlier but it turns into a cancel button. All I need to do now is just be able to single finger double tap now and I can stop this timer if I wanted to. What’s happened is our picker item area has now turned into a digital read out area and it counts down in second intervals but if I touch it I’ll show what happens.
About every six seconds it’s going to announce it again. You can always touch another button down here if you don’t want to hear that counting down nonstop here. That is just how easy it is to use the timer. Now you do need to know that if you have a timer set you’re able to exit the clock app and it’s going to continue to run in the background for you. You’re going to receive all of your alarms for all of those timers exactly when you need them. Unless of course your iPhone is turned off.
I’m going to go ahead and hand the microphone over to see if we have any questions for anything that has been covered so far.
Elizabeth
This is Elizabeth from Virginia Beach. I was just saying when I am setting a timer like that I would always do pause, two finger double tap to pause and to redo again. That’s what I was doing as I was going along here.
Douglas Walker
Elizabeth, thank you so much for that. Absolutely, that is a great tip to give us today. If your timer is going or you want to stop and start your timer again, Elizabeth was saying you can use two fingers instead of having to find that stop start button there. You just tap twice with two fingers and you can pause it and then you can start it again. This is going to be the same gesture that you use to answer the phone and to perform so many other tasks. So that will stop any music playing and start any music playing but it will also work in the timer. That’s a great tip for you. Thanks, Elizabeth.
Larry Muffett
Donna would like to know can you remove the hourly forecast from the weather app.
Douglas Walker
Unfortunately, I think the hourly forecast is there to stay. Touching close to the bottom of the screen you can quickly jump to that weekly forecast but the app is set up where that’s something that can’t be removed. This is an app that is just an iPhone app. It’s not on the iPad or the iPad mini. It is an iPhone and iPod app. There’s plenty of great weather apps out there. WX Alert is a great app for using on the iPad. I can put up a listing of those later on for you.
Larry Muffett
Well, you answer Rosalyn’s question. She said she has an iPad Mini and can’t find the weather app. So I believe you’ve answered that question for her. I’m going to turn the microphone loose here and see if we have some questions from the participants. We’ve got time for a couple.
Caller
Douglas, this is (Inaudible) from Houston, Texas. My app, the weather app where it says the time, if it’s going to rain or whatever, let’s say I have five o’clock and it’s raining here. Then at 5:30 it says that it’s going to be sunny but it’s that particular time it’s stuck there all the time whether it rains. It’s always stuck there. I wonder how I can take that off.
Douglas Walker
It sounds like you have a glitch going on there with the app. My recommendation is there’s one of two ways you can take care of glitches like this. One of those ways is to do a reset and this is not a restart, a hard restart. This is a soft reset. It’s very easy to do. While your device is running, while your iPhone, iPod or iPad is turned on—this is something that is good to do probably at least once a week—which is you can hold down the home button which is at the bottom of the screen. You can hold down the power on and off button which is at the top right hand edge of the screen. You can hold those two down at the same time and you’ll hold them down for about 15 seconds or if you have some vision, what will happen is the screen will go black and the apple will reappear in the center part of the screen, for those of you who have vision.