2014-08-20-iFocus 7 Vision Accessibility Features
Seminars@Hadley
iFocus 7: Tips for Using the
Vision Accessibility Features in iOS7
Presented by
Douglas Walker
Moderated by
Larry Muffett
August 20, 2014
Host
You’re listening to Seminars @ Hadley. This seminar is “iFocus 7: Tips on Using the Vision Accessibility Features in iOS7,” presented by Douglas Walker, moderated by Larry Muffett.
Larry Muffett
Welcome to Seminars @ Hadley. Before we formally begin let’s go over some housekeeping matters.
For those using access technologies the following pointers may help you while in this seminar. If you have a connected microphone press and hold the CTRL key to speak. You’ll hear a tone that indicates when it’s your turn to speak. Make sure and release the CTRL key after your statement is over.
If you do not have a microphone you’ll still be able to interact with our presenter and with members of the group by means of text messages. To type a text message to the group press F8, type the text and press the Enter key. Pressing F9 will take you to the list of messages. You can arrow through them as you wish. The newest message will appear at the bottom of the list. I will be monitoring the text box and relaying those questions on at the appropriate time.
We are interested in your feedback. As you exit the seminar today you’ll have the opportunity to complete a short online survey. We certainly appreciate you taking a moment to complete that for us.
Again, 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 seventh in our iFocus Series. Our presenter today is Hadley instructor and iDevice trainer guru, maestro Douglas Walker.
Today Douglas will be sharing some tips and pointers with you on the vision accessibility features of iOS7. Now let me welcome Douglas and begin our seminar. Welcome, Douglas.
Douglas Walker
Wow, it is hard to believe that we have another iFocus already coming around and we’re in iFocus #7. And we’re planning on covering four more topics today. Now we’ll be using an iPhone for demonstrating most of today’s topics, however we’ll be using an iPad for demonstrating today’s first topic.
Okay, so for the first time ever we will be covering a low vision topic. Now, for those of you who are new to your device or who are just interested in learning more about the low vision accessibility features, we will be focusing today on using Apple’s Zoom feature. Now Zoom is the magnification software that’s built right into Apple’s operating system.
Okay, so when I first started thinking about doing Zoom as one of our iFocus topics, it crossed my mind that it might seem a bit awkward because this is an audio presentation. And needless to say this is a very visual topic. However, I’ve had so many requests on asking if I would cover the low vision topics that I thought we’d take a shot and we’ll just see how it goes.
Now, I’m really counting on you using your iDevices and following along as we go. I really do think that you’ll be surprised at how many tips and tricks that you really do pick up as we move through this today.
Alright, so as we said earlier we’ll be using an iPad during today’s first demonstration, and we have all the same functionality whether we’re using an iPad, an iPhone or an iPod Touch with the Zoom features. However on the iPhone the menus are going to be more in a single list view instead of having two panels that we find when using our iPad, and we’ll discuss how panels look in just a bit.
Now, we’re going to begin by first learning how to turn the Zoom feature on and then we’ll get into some tips and tricks that might make using Zoom just a little bit easier for you. Alright, so let’s begin by first going to our Settings menu. Now, we have a Settings icon and it looks like a series of gears and it actually says “Settings” below it, and we’ll just tap it to bring up our Settings menu. I’m going to go ahead and tap that and mine’s opened.
When our Settings menu first opens we notice that represented with two panes or what Apple likes to call panels. Now, these panels simply consist of two lists or items down each side of the screen here, and our left panel acts a lot like headings or content areas that we’re able to select. And if we touch one of these headings or areas that are on the left it opens up a whole new panel on the right side of our screen. And what we see on the right will relate specifically back to that heading or to that content area back on the left.
Also, if we touch one of these headings that are on the left here we notice that it will be highlighted or turned blue, and right now our general button is the default so it’s actually highlighted in our left panel here. So we know that everything then that’s in the right panel falls under our General Options there. And luckily this is exactly where we want to be because Accessibility is under our General Options. So we just need to look in our right panel to find our Accessibility button and it’s the fourth or fifth button from the top of the screen here. And we’ll just touch it to open our Accessibility Options and I’ll go ahead and do that.
Alright, so now we notice that our right panel has totally changed and our Accessibility Options have opened in the right panel and they’re now listed here. Now we can always go back to the previous list here in the right panel if we need to simply by touching the back button in the top-left corner of our right panel there. However, the item that we’re looking for is in this list and it’s really near the top of our screen, so we’ll find that Zoom is the second item in the list and it falls just under Voice over there. Now we just need to touch our Zoom button to open up our Zoom Settings here.
Okay. If our iDevice is new or right out of the box Zoom is going to be turned off, so here is where we would come to turn it on. Now all the way to the right-hand side of the screen there is an on/off button that we simply need to touch to turn our Zoom feature on. We also have a couple of beginning instructions that fall just below that that are supposed to start helping us learn how to use our Zoom feature.
So let’s go ahead and turn it on, so we’ll touch our off/on button here and turn on Zoom. So I’ll just touch it. We notice that it turns blue there. Now, the first thing that you notice is that your screen suddenly magnifies. Alright, so remember those “Getting started” instructions? Well, we’ll need to know one of them right off the bat to even be able to find them or get back to them on the screen, and that’s the three-finger drag. Now, we simply use three fingers to begin dragging or moving ourselves around on the screen. It’s almost like sliding a little piece of paper around on a desktop by using three fingers to do it. And we’re able to scroll up and down and all around using those three fingers on the screen.
Now, our fingers will need to be separated by about a half an inch while we’re dragging around on the screen. So let’s go ahead and begin by dragging to and checking out these beginning Apple instructions that are here – I think there’s only about three of them here. We’ll drag the screen around until we find them and there they are for me.
Our first instruction says “Double-tap three fingers to zoom.” Now this is how we’re able to quickly jump in and out of or toggle in and out of Zoom. This is really handy if we quickly want to see our entire desktop and then quickly magnify it again. So let’s talk about how this works. If we just tap the screen with three fingers – remember, we’ve already been dragging around with three fingers but if we just tap the screen twice with three fingers we’ll find that our entire screen becomes visible when the magnification is turned off.
Now again, we’ll need to have our fingers separated by about half an inch in order to perform our three-finger double tap; otherwise if our fingers are all together our iPad is just going to see that as one giant finger and we don’t want that. Okay, so how about we try it? We’ll just tap twice with three fingers. I’ll do that, just a three-finger double tap and now our entire screen is no longer magnified and it’s now all visible to us. And now all we have to do is tap twice again with three fingers to enlarge our screen again, and we’ll do just that, a little triple-finger double tap. I’ll do it and now our screen is magnified again.
We’ll drag back to our instructions here with that three-finger drag that we did earlier, and we’ll take a look at actually one that we’ve already been using. This one tells us that we can drag with three fingers to move around the screen, and I’m reading it as I drag across with those three fingers. And we’ve already been doing that so we’ll move on to our next and last instruction here.
And this instruction says “Double-tap with three fingers and drag to change Zoom.” Alright, now this gives us the ability to change the size of our magnification, to change it to a different size magnification on our screen. Now this gesture might take a bit of practice at first but it’s super-useful. Okay, so this is just like our three-finger double tap only we’re going to hold on our second tap – we’re not going to lift our fingers on that second tap.
So on our second tap we’ll just leave our fingers on the screen, and then if we push up the screen with our three fingers without lifting them the magnification will increase; and if we pull our three fingers down or drag our three fingers down the screen without lifting them now we’ll decrease our magnification. Now, when we get the text size right where we like it we simply just lift our three fingers and that’s now our default magnification.
So remember, you tap twice with three fingers and you push up the screen to increase the magnification; and drag down the screen to decrease it. And then when you lift your fingers once you get the size you want it that’s your default. So that’s pretty handy there.
Alright, and then once we get it where we want it – I can even try that. I’m going to tap the three fingers and then push up and pull down and then you just lift those three fingers. Remember they have to be separated just about a half an inch there.
Alright, and then if you drag around the screen you’ll notice that all the text stays that same size then. And if we use our three-finger double tap to toggle zoom on and off we’ll see that our current magnification remains the default when we zoom back in. So I’ll zoom out by double-tapping with three fingers and I’ll zoom back in, and the magnification that we just set by using the three-finger double tap and then drag up and drag down, it remains the same. This double-tap and drag is a really great gesture because at any time we’re able to change our magnification size with that gesture.
Okay, so now that we have just enough instructions to be dangerous how about we move back to our desktop to learn some tips or some tricks on quickly being able to move around on our screen. So we’ll just tap our Home button to be able to get back to our desktop and I’ll go ahead and tap that Home button.
Alright, so now when our magnification is turned on as it probably still is for you it can sometimes be difficult to find what we’re looking for simply by just dragging around with three fingers. Or sometimes it’s hard to quickly get to where we want to be on our screen. It’s just easy to get lost sometimes on our screen if we have a lot of magnification, especially if we’re new to our device.
Luckily there’s a much faster way of finding an item or an area that’s on the screen without having to just drag around or locate it, and that’s called Spotting. Now, to learn how to use Spotting we’ll use our three-finger double tap to toggle first out of Zoom, so first let’s use our three-finger double tap to toggle Zoom off – so I’ll just tap twice with three fingers.
Okay, now our entire screen has become visible. Now, instead of using the three-finger double tap to turn on Zoom and start dragging around on the screen we’re able to quickly move to an area by using that same three-finger double tap. However, we’re going to perform this gesture right in the area in which you want to go to on the screen. For instance, I know that my Safari app is on the bottom left-hand corner of my screen here, so if we perform the three-finger double tap right on the bottom left-hand corner of the screen we’ll see that the magnified area jumps right to our Safari icon.
Alright, so I’m going to do that and I’m right there on Safari, and that’s kind of handy not having to drag around there on the screen. That’s pretty good. And if we zoom back out, I’ll do another three-finger double tap and zoom back out. Alright, now I know that I’ve placed my Settings icon, mine’s in the bottom right-hand corner of my screen.
We can quickly move to that Settings icon by performing the three-finger double tap right on the bottom right-hand corner of my screen here, and I’ll do just that. And here I am. Now I’m at least close to that icon so I don’t have to drag too much to find it. Alright, so I’ll go ahead and toggle that Zoom back off with our three-finger double tap there.
Alright, so this is great. We can see how spotting can really help us to save some time and to keep us from getting lost on our screen. Spotting is a really useful feature, and again, it’s going to take a little time to master that but it really helps to cut down on our eye fatigue from having to just sort of drag around on the screen.
Okay, so let’s talk about one more thing that might help when using our Zoom feature, and this is selecting the proper background or wallpaper to use. Now, when I first purchased my first iPad I thought it would be great to find wallpaper that was just like a solid color so that I would get rid of all the visual clutter in the background. Well, I soon found out that without some type of texture or some type of pattern in the background that it became very difficult at times to see if I was actually moving across the desktop when I was dragging around with that three-finger drag. It was hard to tell at times.
So let’s take a look at how we can find some new wallpaper with some really great texture in it. So we’ll head back to our Settings menu and I’ll go ahead and touch that Settings. Now remember, mine’s in the bottom right-hand corner; of course yours may be in a totally different location. So we’ll activate our Settings here.
Alright, now in our left panel right under General here we will tap on the “Wallpapers and Brightness” button there. Alright, and now that it’s selected we notice that our right panel has totally changed and it gives us an area where it says “Choose a new wallpaper” – it’s three or four items down the panel there. So we can just tap that button and I just did it.
Okay, so what happens is we have two choices up on the top right-hand side of our screen that look like images there. One says “Dynamic” underneath it and one says “Stills.” Now, dynamic wallpaper is going to have little bubbles that kind of float or move around in the background, and believe me, that can be very visually distracting. So we’re going to choose our “Stills” button to the right there. So I’ll just tap it and I’ll go ahead and touch that “Stills” button there.
Alright, and now in the right panel we have quite a few wallpapers to choose from here. And we can kind of scroll up and down, and when we find one that might work for us or we think might work for us we’re able to just tap on it and it’ll open up and we’re able to see how it looks. And I just did that; I just touched on one. And we can even practice sort of dragging around or changing our magnification before we select it to see if it’s going to work for us.
Okay, I believe I’ve found one that might work for me, but if I didn’t care for it we would choose that “Cancel” button on the bottom left-hand corner of the screen; and then we could go back and choose another from the list to sort of play around with. But since this one looks like it might work for me we’ll just choose the “Set Both” button in the bottom right-hand corner of our screen here, and this will set the wallpaper to both my lock screen and my background wallpaper here.