iFocus 12: Tips for Using the Vision Accessibility
Seminars@Hadley
iFocus 12: Tips for Using the Vision Accessibility Features in iOS
Presented by
Douglas Walker
Moderated by
Larry Muffett
February 3, 2016
Larry Muffett
Welcome to Seminars@Hadley. My name is Larry Muffett. I’m a member of Hadley seminars team and I also work in curricular affairs. Today’s seminar is iFocus 12: Tips on using the Vision Accessibility features in IOS. Our presenter today is Hadley’s technology expert Douglas Walker. Douglas is the originator of the iFocus series, the creator of the videos on Hadley’s YouTube channel and is a veteran Hadley instructor. Today Hadley is going to share his almost venn-like knowledge of iDevices and then particular tips for using the vision accessibility features in iOS. So now let me welcome Douglas and we’ll get them running. Welcome Douglas.
Douglas Walker
It is so great to be back for our 12th quarterly iFocus seminar. And today we are going to take a look at some of the great things that were added with iOS 9. As well as some cool features that we can find in the new iPhone 6S and 6S Plus. Now iOS 9 was mainly all about making the operating system a lot more stable. And not a lot of new features were added. However, there are a couple of really great changes that have been added to our notes app and we have been given an all-new news app, which is really fantastic. And it really is something that I use every day.
All right, we’re actually going to begin today’s seminar by talking about a couple of new features that were added to the new iPhone 6S and the iPhone 6S Plus. And these are our new 3D touch features. Okay, so we’ll actually have two segments in today’s seminar. In our first segment today we will discuss 3D touch. And then we’ll take a break for some questions and in our second segment we will discuss our new news app and some of the new features that have been added to our notes app. So how about we go ahead and jump right in?
All right, so today we’ll be looking at a totally new way of interacting with our iPhone and this is our new 3D touch gesture. Now this gesture of course is only going to be available if we have an iPhone 6S or iPhone 6S Plus. And we will also need to be running iOS 9 or newer.
All right. Apple has always been really great at making every aspect of iOS successful, and 3D touch is no exception to this. Now we’re all familiar with gestures like flicking left and right, single-finger double tapping and even using a rotor gesture. Well, now we have what Apple calls 3D touch. And we have a couple of new gestures that we will be using to activate 3D touch on our devices desktop.
All right, so first of all how about we talk a little about exactly what 3D touch will do for us and then we’ll take a look at the gestures that we’ll use to activate it? All right, so force touch is actually the magic behind 3D touch. And force touch allows us to press down on our iPhone screen to activate our 3D touch feature. Now if we’re on our desktop and we are touching one of the apps or one of the app’s icons on our screen all we need to do is just press down firmly on our screen to activate 3D touch.
Okay, it does seem a little bit awkward at first to be pressing down on our iPhone screen. However, when we press down firmly on our screen we will launch or activate what Apple likes to call a quick-actions menu. And this will be for the app that we happen to be touching. Now this is sort of like right-clicking a mouse, if you’re maybe a visual user or maybe pressing the application screen on a PC to open a context menu, or you know, if you are a Mac user it is like pressing VO, shift and M. Again, pressing firmly on our screen will bring up our quick actions menu that is specific to just the app that we’re touching.
And then we can just right and left-flick to this quick actions menu to find some really great shortcuts for our app. Now as we know there is always more than one way to perform most any action on any device. And the one that we just discussed means that we actually have to be touching the apps icon that we want to interact with before we actually can perform our force touch.
Now if you’re like me and you interact with your iPhone by flicking left and right to move between the apps on our desktop then it’s your lucky day, because Apple has created a gesture for us as well. And this is our double-tap, hold and press gesture. And this will launch our same quick-actions menu.
Now the really cool thing is that we will be given both auditory and tactile clues that will help to let us know exactly what is happening on our screen. So how about we take a look at exactly how all this works? All right, we have our iPhone 6S Plus, or I do right here in front of me. And our 3D touch feature is pretty much limited to our Apple apps for now. That is until third party developers really begin to take advantage of it. Now we have our phone app in the bottom left corner of our screen here, so how about we begin with it?
First, we will just touch our phone app to bring focus to it. Now once we touch our phone app we aren’t going to lift our finger or move our finger off it. So, how about we just touch our phone app and we’ll just touch it here. Okay, remember we’re going to leave our finger on our phone app and not move it. Now we heard VoiceOver announce single-finger double tap, and of course we could do this to activate or open it.
However, today is all about checking out our 3D touch features. So now we will just firmly press on our screen, so let’s just press here. So we’ll press. All right, great. Our quick-actions menu has opened and now we can just lift our finger from our screen.
And now we heard quite kind of – you may have heard it; it’s a little pop audio queue and I felt a little single vibration to help us know that our quick-actions menu has opened. Now if we happen to press on the app that doesn’t support 3D touch we’ll hear a couple of tones and we will feel a couple of vibrations instead of just one. And of course we won’t have any type of quick actions menu open up for us.
However, what we have here is perfect because our quick-actions menu for our phone app has opened. And now we can simply just write or left-flick to this quick-actions menu here. So let’s go ahead and right-flick through this and see what we have here. So we’ll just right-flick.
Okay, so what we have here is in our quick-actions menu. It usually lists the three most recent people that we’ve called here. So that’s what we have and there’s my daughter there, so I’ll just keep right-flicking through this. We’ll right-flick again. And there is another daughter of mine, so we’ll just right-flick again and see what we have. That’s the second of the third. And there is my third contact or person that I’ve called most recently here. And that’s my wife, so we’ll flick through the right again. And we have the ability to create a new contact from here too.
And we’ll right-flick one more time. And you heard that bump, well that’s our end of list audio queue. So, we know for sure that we have reached the end of our quick-actions menu here. All right, we aren’t going to activate any of these items here, because we’re going to take a look at our second gesture for launching our quick-actions menu. However, if I were to flick through this list and single-finger double tap on any of these people that were – that’s listed in this list it would automatically open my phone app and we could call them right from there, which is pretty great.
All right, so how about we head back to our desktop and look at our second action or second way of launching our quick-actions menu here. So we’ll head back to the desktop here. Now to close our phone app’s quick-actions menu we can either press our home button in the bottom center of our screen here or we could just perform our scrub gestures. So how about we just press our home button for now and we’ll just press the home button here.
Okay, so our quick-actions menu has closed and we have been placed right back on our desktop screen here. Now we mentioned earlier that we can also activate our quick-actions menu as we’re flicking through our apps. So how about we check out this gesture on how this works. We’ll just touch our calendar app in the top-left corner of our screen here. So I’ll go ahead and touch our calendar app here.
All right and here is our calendar app. Now we could perform our double-tap holding gesture to activate our calendar app’s quick-actions menu, but how about we just right-flick a couple of times here. And we’ll just right-flick, so we’ll go ahead and right-flick. And let us go ahead and right-flick again. Okay, here we are on our clock app. Now to activate our 3D touch feature by using our double-tap and hold gesture – we’re going to do that. And we’re going to do that so we can check out our quick-actions menu for our clock app here.
So to do this we’ll just single-finger double-tap and hold and we will press down firmly on our screen. Now, we could perform this gesture anywhere on our screen and we don’t have to physically be touching the icon of our clock app to do this. Okay, remember there our quick-actions menu will open and we will be placed right in it depending upon of course where we’re touching on our screen. So let’s go ahead and give it a try. We will just double-tap, hold and then press.
Now remember we won’t lift our finger after our second tap and then we’ll just firmly press again. So here we go. Let’s do it. We keep getting the time here. So we’ll double-tap, hold and press. All right, we heard our tone or I did and I felt the vibration here and our clock’s quick-actions menu has open. Now we just so happen to be touching near the center of our screen. And since our clock app is at the top of our screen chances are we then placed it at the end and I think I was actually touching the bottom of this menu that popped up, so I think and actually place this in the bottom of it, at the bottom for our quick-actions menu here.
So since we’re at the bottom of it, how about we just left-flick to check it out? And I’m going to just touch here, because I know that – There’s our timer at that bottom of that list and we can actually single-finger double-tap and just start our timer from here. So that’s kind of cool. So let’s just left-flick up the rest of this list. I’ll left-flick. Okay, so we could start our stopwatch right from this quick-actions menu. I’ll left-flick again. Or we could create a new alarm right from our quick-actions menu. I’ll left-flick again. And we’ve been placed right back on our clock app here or icon.
I’ll flick one more time. All right. And then we heard the top of list audio key there. Now, this is something that I’ve already found myself using a lot, because I actually use my timer as my sleep timer for my music app. So if we were to right-flick back to it we can just activate it and open up our timer here. So let’s go ahead and right-flick to that and right-flicking back again. And there is my timer there. So all we need to do is just single-finger double-tap to open it.
Now when we activate our timer here our clock app will open and we will be placed right in our timer tab and our timer will actually be counting down with the last time that we set. So how about we just single-finger double-tap here? So we’ll just single-finger double-tap. Okay and there you go. Here we are in our timer tab and it is counting down from 30 minutes, which is the last time that I had set here. And so that is pretty great.
All right, so with our new 3D touch gestures we have a couple of totally new features that take full advantage of 3D touch. And these are our new peek and pop gestures. So how about we jump right in and see exactly how peek and pop works here?
Again, peek and pop are only going to be available if you have an iPhone 6S, a 6S Plus or newer. And remember we’ll also need to be running iOS9 or newer. Now peek and pop are features that actually work within different apps. And peek and pop allows us to get previews of content within different apps, such as mail and photos and messages.
Now, we’re going to be using our mail app to see exactly how we can take advantage of peek and pop. Okay, if we’re within our mail app and we are touching one of the messages within our inbox, all we need to do is just press down firmly on our screen to activate 3D touch. And now when we do this we will be given a preview of our mail message.
Okay, this is actually referred to as our peek gesture because we’re just giving a little peek at our message. Now as we mentioned earlier it does seem a bit awkward at first to be pressing down on our iPhone screen. However, when we press down firmly on our screen we’ll launch or activate this preview for – And of course it’s only going to be for the mail message that we’re actually touching at the moment.
Now we’ll also have some action features that will be available to us. And if you aren’t yet sure how to use action features, well it’s your lucky day because we have an iFocus video called Using the E-mail Action Features. It does a pretty good job of explaining what our action features are and exactly how they work. So we’ll talk about how to get to our iFocus videos a little bit later in today’s seminar.
Okay, again pressing firmly on our screen will allow us to peek in or preview our mail message. Of course, this is just as we said for the message that we’re currently touching. And then if we just slide our finger to the bottom-right corner or to the right side of our screen we can find some really great action features for our app or a preview. Now as we mentioned earlier there is always more than one way to perform most actions on any device. And the one that we just discussed means that we actually have to be physically touching the mail message in which we want to see our preview, you know, this is before we perform our force touch.
Now if you interact with your iPhone by flicking left and right, of course this is to move between the items in your inbox or between the items on your screen then we will be using the double-tap and hold and press gesture that we used earlier when we discussed the 3D touch on our desktop. And our double-tap hold and press gesture will also activate our peek feature as well.
Now the really cool thing is that we’ll be given againboth audio and tactile clues that will help to let us know what is happening on our screen. Now all of this might sound a bit confusing, but it will all begin to make sense once we really see it in action here. So, how about we take a look at exactly how all this works?
All right, so we still have our iPhone right here in front of us and how about we move to a message within our mail app to check out how all this works? But our clock app is still open here, so let’s just tap our home button here to close it and we’ll just tap. There. And we’ll just flick to our mail app here, so we’ll get to our mail. Okay, and of course we will just single-finger double-tap to open our mail here. So we will just single-finger double-tap.
Okay, so here I am in actually my folders list here. So I’m going to go ahead and jump right to my iCloud now, mailbox right to our inbox here. Okay, so here I am in my inbox here. And we have just a couple of mail messages here in my inbox. So what I’m going to do is just right-flick to the first message in my list here, and so we’ll just right-flick. There’s our search field there. So let’s right-flick again until we get to this mail message here. And we’ll pause our speech with a two-finger single-tap there.
All right, so here we are on our new message from broadway.com. And it is currently unread. Now, how about we look at our first method for performing our peek gesture here? And this means that we’ll first need to touch our mail message and then we’ll just firmly press on our message to perform our peekgesture. And we’ll end up with our preview pane of our message.