2013-11-13-iFocus4

Seminars@Hadley

iFocus 4 – Tips on Using the

Accessibility Features in iOS 7

Presented by

Douglas Walker

Moderated by

Larry Muffett

November 11, 2013

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 iFocus 4-- number 4 of our courtly series—Tops on using accessibility features in iOS 7. Our presenter today is a familiar one to many of you who are regular participants. Douglas Walker is a veteran Hadley instructor and I feel pretty confident in saying he’s a definite technology guru. Today Douglas will be sharing his knowledge about the accessibility features and the iOS operating system.

Now let me formally welcome Douglas and I’m going to turn the microphone over to him. Douglas, good afternoon.

Douglas Walker

Well, here we are again for our fourth and final iFocus seminar of the year. Wow, this year has really flown bye and Apple products have seen some really big changes this year. We’ve been given two new iPhones, the iPad Air, a new iPad mini, new Macs and of course, the new iOS 7. We’re always so excited when Apple introduces a new device or new operating system. We also tend to get just a bit nervous because with new operating systems often come some changes. Now with iOS 7 we had some major changes to the appearance of the operating system. However, with all of these changes Apple didn’t make major changes with most of the accessibility features. Now they did make some really great additions to accessibility but not changing the older accessibility features that are there.

There are still a few bugs that need to be worked out. However, Apple is really great about addressing any bugs and fixing them in later updates. We’ve already seen a couple of small updates that address some of the issues with the voiceover sensitivity. Okay, today we’ll first be covering what’s new in accessibility and then later we’ll go a little more in depth with changes to the notification center. We’ll also look at the new control center and then we’ll look at the new really cool handwriting feature. If we have any extra time we’ll try to see what’s new with Siri. So let’s go ahead and get started.

We’ve had some new gestures added but we’ve also had a few changes to our old gestures. So we’re going to begin by looking at the changes to our old gestures or the way that we used to do some things. We used to unlock by finding the slider and double tapping on it. Now after waking up our device a three finger flick to the right wakes up our lock screen. We’re still able to flick through the right or drag our finger down to the lock screen and find the lock button and double tap on that. But this new three finger flick to the right makes it just a bit faster. Let me show you how that’s going to work.

I’ll go ahead and wake up our device by tapping the home button here. Then I’ll do a three finger flick to the right to unlock the screen. Now what this did is it put me on my passcode screen. Now if I didn’t have a passcode—it’s going to go ahead and lock because I’m not making any changes there. However, if I didn’t have a passcode I would be placed right on my desktop there. Hopefully you have a passcode setup though because you don’t want anybody getting into your stuff in your iPhone. So it’s as easy as that.

Now another change has to do with dictation. It used to be difficult sometimes to find that dictate button on the keyboard but now a two finger double tap allows you to dictate right into an edit field. Let’s go ahead and look at that. I’m going to go to my notes nap. I’ll go ahead and open up my device, open up my notes app here. I’ll go ahead and open this and we’ll start a new note. Double tap to start a new note. Again, we’re in an edit field here so I’ll just do a two finger double tap and we’ll just dictate right into our edit field here. I’m just testing this to see if it works. There it is, it put it right into my note there.

Now I did a two finger double tap to stop after I finished speaking. So it’s just a two finger double tap to get going on that and a two finger double tap to stop and then your text can be placed right in the field. Now remember this will work with in any edit field. So even if you’re in text messaging or emails, stuff like that, any editing field this is going to work. Alright, so let’s move on.

Most of us are familiar with how to launch a notification center. We first need to touch the status bar at the very top of our screen and then a three finger swipe down is going to launch your notification center. Let’s take a look at that. Let me get out of my notes and back to the homepage. I’ll go ahead and touch my status bar. The status bar is at the very top of the screen here. I can just swipe down since I touched where my time is. Swipe down with three fingers and there is my notification center.

We’re going to look at the notification center a little more in depth later on. So we’ll just get out of this for now but that is one gesture that’s been there but there are some other changes that I want to show you that involve touching that status bar like that. We’re going to use the scrub gesture to exit our notification here. The scrub gesture works to get rid of any pop up box or any dialogue box or to go back to the previous screen. It’s simply just scrubbing your finger back and forth on the screen. It’s sort of like forming the letter “z” on the screen. I’m going to take two fingers and scrub them back and forth. There went my notification center. I’m back on the desktop now.

Now just like the three finger swipe down launches the notification, the three finger swipe up the screen launches our new control center. Now the control center has some really cool stuff there. There’s a flashlight and your ability to turn Wi-Fi on and off. We’re going to cover that in depth more later on in today’s seminar. I’m not going to cover it right here but I wanted to show you how to get that. So I’m going to again, touch in our status bar where our time and all that is. Now we get the hints to do all this, so I’m just going to flip up with three fingers and there is our control center here.

We’re going to cover the control center, like I said, more in depth later today. So we’ll just get out of this for now and I’ll use this scrub gesture to get out of it. So I’ll scrub two fingers back and forth. There we are back on the desktop again. We know a three finger swipe down launches our notification center after touching the status bar. However the three finger swipe down will also launch our swipe down search if the focus is not on the status bar. So don’t touch the status bar to begin with. We’ll first want to touch somewhere on the desktop to make sure we’re not up there in the status bar. I’ll touch an app on the desktop.

Now we used to get to the spotlight search by tapping the home button and it would bring up our search. The spotlight search gives us the ability to search our entire idevice. Now that I’m on the desktop here I’ll just go ahead and flick down with three fingers. We’re now placed right into a search field where we can search our entire device—emails, apps, music, everything can be searched from here. It’s a really fast way to move around. You can also use the dictate gesture there that we just talked about to enter text into the edit field. Again, I have that search bar at the top and a corded keyboard for entering text at the bottom of the screen there. I’m going to scrub to get out of the spotlight search but I love the spotlight search.

Now we’ll also have a few new gestures that I would like to talk about. The four finger double tap turns on voiceover help or what used to be called “voiceover practice.” Let me show you how that works. It’s sort of awkward on an iPhone. It’s easier on an iPad. On iPhone you almost have to turn your fingers to the side here. I’m going to tap twice with four fingers. I’ll go ahead and do that. Okay, it told me how to get out of that if I needed to. I could perform that same gesture or do a scrub.

This gives us a safe place where we can practice different gestures. Practice the gestures you just learned or that we just talked about. I’ll touch the screen. It simply tells us what’s going on. I’ll flick to the right. This is just a practice. I’ll do that two finger double tap now. It gives a lot of information there. It also does that dictate feature in the edit field here. It didn’t mention that. That is our practice area, our practice help. I’m going to go ahead and get out of that by doing that scrub gesture we’ve been talking about. I’ll scrub two fingers.

That’s great. It told us what it does and then it got us out of there. We also have a new gesture, it’s the three finger quadruple tap. So we tap three times, quadruple tap here. The three finger quadruple tap copies what voiceover spoke last to the clipboard. This makes it much easier if you’re in iBook’s or if you’re in a word processor and you want to copy text. You just have it speak a piece of text and then you do this three finger quadruple tap. I’m going to go ahead and touch an app on the screen and then I’m going to copy what it says here. I’ll go ahead and touch here on the screen. Now that it has it has spoken, it said “Seeing Eye GPS double tap to open.” I’m going to copy that and then we can go and paste that anywhere else. Go ahead and do that three finger quadruple tap here. I’ll tap four times with three fingers.

It told me it was copied to the pasteboard. Now if I wanted to I could go back into a word process, if I wanted, to paste that and I use my rotor, go down to edit and I would paste that right into my word processor there. Those are some really great, new gestures. We also had a few changes to our rotor which we just mentioned. The rotor is used to quickly access settings but more so it gives you the ability to move through different elements that are on a page or website. If you’re not comfortable with using the rotor yet you might want to go to Hadley’s ne YouTube channel. There you will find instructional videos on how to use different aspects on all the idevices. You’ll be able to watch and listen to the using rotor video while you’re there. It does a pretty good job of explaining how to use the rotor in different applications.

The first rotor change that I want to talk about is the action rotor setting. Now this rotor element will be available when you land in a mail message when you’re in your inbox. I’ll go ahead and activate my mail and I’ll show you how that looks. I’ll double tap to open mail here. We are in our inbox here and a list of our mail messages. I’ll active the rotor and show you where actions is in the rotor. I’ll go ahead and put two fingers on here and sort of turn the clockwise. There’s actions right there. Now that we’ve found actions I could just flick right to read through these messages but now that I’m on actions I can flick down or swipe my finger down the screen and we can choose between the different actions that are associated with this email. I’ll flick down.

Let me flick down to delete or trash. Now if I double tap it would put it right in my trash or move it from my inbox list. So I’ll just double tap that and it places me on the next email in the list. That’s a pretty handy feature to be able to give you a lot more options from right there in your inbox. Another rotor item is containers. The ability to move by containers has been in the iPad already but it’s new to the iPhone and iPod Touch. Now containers give you the ability to quickly move through different locations within an application. Since we’re already here I’ll show you how this work. We’re already on a mail message. I’ll open this Wildcat Band mail message up here.

I’ve been placed on that back button at the top of the page. Now I’ll go to my rotor and find containers. So I’ll just turn to rotor here and there it is so I’ll stop turning. Now if I flick down I move to important areas. I know that this is going to move me to the mail headers, which is at the top of our page. Now if I flick down again it’s going to move me right into my mail messages and I flick again it’s going to move me to my mail tools at the bottom of the page. Those are the different containers that have been setup within mail. So I’ll flick down and there’s my headers. I can start flicking to the right through my headers but if I flick down again, it moves me to the bottom. Let me flick down again, it jumped me right to the bottom. It typically jumps you right to the message inside there.

Nope it’s just going to jump me to the top and bottom of this message here. It will change depending upon which application you’re in. I know if I’m in Safari it’s going to move me to the back button there and if I flick up it’s going to move me to the top of the webpage and the different tolls that are there. You have to sort of experiment to see where it’s going to move. Like I said, it’s going to change depending upon the app that we’re using. Our most interesting new accessibility feature is also in the rotor and it’s handwriting. Handwriting is now in the rotor. I want to show you that. Let me move to the home screen to get to this.

Here I am on the home screen and I’ll activate the rotor to show you handwriting here. There is handwriting. Handwriting gives you the ability to be able to quickly jump to apps. It gives you the ability to interrupt passcode or even write within a text field. We’ll spend more time on handwriting later on in today’s seminar but it’s right there in the rotor. I wanted to show you how you get to that. Another new rotor item gives you the ability to turn off sound effects. This is really especially useful when using a braille display. Let me show you where sounds are here.