Ifocus OS7-Composing an Email

iFocus OS7-Composing an Email

Seminars@Hadley

iFocus OS7 – Composing an Email

Presented by

Douglas Walker

Host

The Hadley School for the Blind presents “iFocus – Tips on Using the Vision Accessibility Features in iOS.” In this installment we’ll look at Composing an Email.

Douglas Walker

Hello, my name is Douglas Walker and I am an instructor of Assistive Technology here at The Hadley School for the Blind. Today we are going to be looking at how to compose an email message. We’re using the iPhone 5S for this demonstration and we’re running iOS software version 7.

Now before you can email, your device must be set up for sending and receiving email messages which we’re not going to cover in today’s video but that might be a video topic for some time in the future. Today we’re assuming that your device is already set up for emailing, so let’s go ahead and get started emailing.

Alright so let’s go ahead and activate our mail app and I’ll go ahead and double-tap to activate it. Alright so we’ve been placed in the last place we were. If you had email opened earlier, you would have been opened in that email but you could go back. There’s a “back” button usually in the top left-hand corner that can take you back to your message list.

Now we’re in our message list now; I want to get you oriented to this page here. So I’m going to place us on the top left button which is our Hadley button; this is our Hadley account. I could double-tap and activate that and it would take us to a list of all of our folders that we have here and I could move to any of those folders – our trash folder or our deleted items and any other folders that I have here – my sent items and stuff like that – but we’re going to stay within this page and sort of move within this page here so let me flick to the right.

There’s our inbox heading to tell you where we are. I’ll flick to the right. Now there’s the “edit” button. This edit button really allows us to select emails and then perform some really nice tasks after selecting it. We’ll come back to this edit button in just a bit. I’ll flick to the right.

Now the “search field” allows us to be able to search through all of our emails and all of our folders here so that’s real handy if you’ve lost an email and need to find it – you can perform a search there. So now if I flick to the right I’ll be placed within my list of emails. You’ll hear the person’s name that sent it to me; you’ll hear when it was sent and a little short piece of the message there. So I’ll flick down to the first item here.

Alright, so I won’t have it read all that; I’ve muted it but you get an idea – it gives you the person that sent it; it gives you a little piece of information about what the subject line and stuff like that and also when it was sent. I’ll flick to the next item in the list. So like I said, it just gives a little blurb and it tells when it was sent and stuff like that.

Alright, so at the very bottom of the screen we have when our message or our email list was updated so I can just touch there. Alright so it was just updated two minutes ago and if I flick to the right down at the bottom right-hand corner, we have our “compose” button. Alright, we’re told that that’s the “compose” button or we could double-tap anywhere on the screen and hold and it would bring up a list of draft emails if we needed to continue working on those emails.

So what we’ll do is we’ll go back to the “edit” button on our top right-hand corner here and we’ll go ahead and activate. Now when we activate the edit button it’s going to turn into a “cancel” button so I’ll go ahead and double-tap and we could cancel out of this action if we wanted to by double-tapping again and it would turn into the “edit” button. But I’m going to select an email in this list – I’ll go to the first one here. I don’t want it to read all that so I muted it and you mute it by just doing a two-finger single tap there.

So I’ll just double-tap to select this. Now visually what you’re going to see is a little button pop up to the left of the email to let you know that you’ve selected it but it will also say that it’s been selected so you heard that. Now along the bottom edge of the screen, you have some really great options to be able to do. We can mark it, flag it and do stuff like that. We can move it and perform some really great functions. So I’ll show you what these three buttons along the bottom can let you do here.

So we’re on the bottom left-hand corner down here. I’ll double-tap to activate that. Now we’ve selected that email; we can flag it and show that it’s important. I’ll flick to the right. We can mark it as in red there. I’ll flick again. Or we can move it to our “junk” folder if you want to or we can cancel this action which I’m going to do. I double-tapped to cancel it. We’re still on the “mark” button. I’ll flick to the right to the second button at the bottom of the screen here. We can move this. So I could double-tap which would bring up the list of all of our folders and we could move it to any of those folders that we want to. Or we would have a “cancel” button on the top right and I could cancel out of that as well.

So I’ll flick to the right and show you our last thing that we could do. We could send it to the “trash” or we could just get rid of this email if we needed to. I don’t want to do that so I’m going to go up to the top and cancel out of this. And again it turned back into an “edit” button.

Now there is an easier way to perform some of these same tasks for me that you’ve seen. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to move to that first email again and I’m going to flick down or swipe my finger down the screen and it’s going to give us some of those same options. Now there’s “more” so if I double-tap, we’re going to be presented with a dialog box that I can flick through to perform different actions here and we just had another email just pop in on us so let’s make sure I’m on that one and I’ll flick down and there’s that “more.”

Now if I double-tap on it, you’re going to see that dialog box appear. Now I could “reply all” to that and everybody that is in that email would be getting a copy of the email that I replied back. I’m going to flick to the right again. I can forward this email; I’ll flick to the right; I can flag it right from here; I can mark it as “unread” and I’m flicking through this; I can move it to “junk” I could move it to another message or another folder or I could cancel out of this. So I’m going to go ahead and double-tap because I’m not going to perform any of those right there.

Alright so I just had a new email come in. Okay, so I’m going to delete that. There’s an easier way to delete that message and I’ll show you how to do that. So I’m going to flick down. There’s more. I’m going to flick down again and there’s “trash” so I can just double-tap on that now and it will quickly move it to trash and it places me on the next item in my list there. So that is pretty handy.

Now if I wanted to I could cycle through all this. I could flick. We have the “more” option; we have the “trash” and if I flick again, we’re back on the “activate” so that would simply open it if I were to double-tap on it there.

Alright so now that we’ve explored our inbox, we’re ready to start composing a new email. So let’s go ahead and head down to the “compose” button in the bottom right-hand corner. Alright so I’m going to double-tap and we’ll start and plan the message. Now I’m automatically placed in the 2 field where I could start typing in. I have a “cancel” button on the top left. Let me orient you to this. There’s the “cancel” button in the top left there; I can flick to the right.

Now this says “new message” cause it’s a brand new message but if I were replying to a message, it would have the subject line there from that last message. So let me flick to the right. Now the “send” button is dimmed right now; it won’t be dimmed once I type in who it’s to and the subject line and stuff like that but it is dimmed right now. We’ll come back there when we’re ready to send it. So I’ll flick to the right. I passed it there so I’ll flick back to it.

So now I could go ahead and type in an email address right there of the recipient but what I want to do is I want to go to my contacts list and add it from my contacts list. So I’ll flick to the right and I can add it from my contacts list right there. So what I’ll do is I will just double-tap here and it will bring up my contact list. Now I could start at the very top of this and start flicking through and now I’m in my contacts and I could flick down through all of these and go down through all of these but I’m wanting to send it to myself today which is kind of sad but I can easily get to my name which is in the Ws for Walker by going to the table index over to the right.

So let me touch over to the right edge. Now I could swipe up or down to move a letter at a time through your alphabet or I could use another gesture where you tape twice with one finger and you keep your finger down on the second tap and then you start dragging your finger down the screen. That allows you to quickly start moving through the list here. So I’m going to double-tap. I’m dragging my finger down the screen; I’ll stop when I get on the Ws and I’m now in my Ws. So that’s a lot faster to move to the Ws than to have to flick all the way down that list. And I’ll flick through this now and there I am in the list. I’ll go ahead and double-tap on that and it’s automatically placed me now, placed my name in the “to” field so that I can email it to myself and I’ll swipe to the left to check it. Yep, see that’s there and I can flick to the right to add another name.

Alright so I’m going to continue flicking down through this to the right and we’ll see what other items are here. I could add another contact from my contacts list there. Now I could CC or BCC it to somebody. I could carbon copy this to another person by typing and email address in there or if I went to the BCC list, that would be blind copying it to somebody where the other recipients wouldn’t see where I’d sent it to that person as well. So I’ll flick to the right. This is where I would type that in and there’s where I would type in their email address to BCC. Now this is the email address that it’s coming from. If I had several accounts in here, I could double-tap that and choose from a different account that it was being sent from but I’m going to send it from this account.

So I’ll flick to the right and there’s that same account. Here’s my subject line and I’ll need to double-tap to edit this. I think I’m just going to type “test” in this. Alright so there we are. Now I can just type the word “test” in this and I’ll put a space there. So we have the word “test” now in our subject line and we can move on down to the message body and type our message now. So I’ll flick to the right. I’m still down in here so… okay so what I needed to do was I needed to touch in our text area here and then I could double-tap to edit that area. And then I’m ready to type.

And I’m just going to say “test video” here, just type a very short email to myself. So it says “test video” there and I can check that. And there we are – I’m in my message here. Alright so that is send from my iPhone. So now that I have the subject line typed and also a little short message – very short two-word message here – I can now send it to myself. Now if I look back up at the “send” button it no longer says “dimmed” so I know that I can send it so I can just double-tap to send this message.

Now when I send it you‘re going to hear an auditory cue that it was sent. Sort of sounds like a rocket taking off and then you’ll hear a little ding that the message has been received. Now you won’t always hear the ding unless of course you’re sending yourself an email message which occasionally I do to remind myself of things, but it’s kind of sad. So we’ll go ahead and double-tap and then after this is sent, we’ll be placed back within our mail list. Let me go ahead and get back up to the “send” button cause I touched something else. And there it went and there it is. You heard the little rocket sound. And there you go – it gave us our information that we received it and I’ve touched back on it there again.

So now your new email is going to be the first email that shows up in your list here. So I’ll tell you what – I’m going to go ahead and activate it to open it up and we’ll take a look at how to read an email here. Alright so when you first open it up it actually places you right within the body of your email for reading. A two-finger swipe up will allow you to read your entire message. Now if it’s a long message it’s kind of handy to do. This is really short but I’ll swipe up and let it read it anyway. And of course it’s gone into the bottom of the email down here where you have several options at the bottom.

Alright so that’s how you read your email that has been sent to you. So what we can do is we can just do our scrub gesture to head back to our list here, so I’ll go ahead and do that scrub. And scrubbing again remember, is just swiping two fingers almost like you’re making a Z and swiping back and forth on the screen to be taken back to your previous list here, so we’ll do that. And there we are – back within our list there.

Alright so email is a really great way to stay in touch with colleagues, family and friends and hopefully this instructional video will help to make sending an email a little bit easier process for you. Again, my name is Douglas Walker and I am an instructor of Assistive Technology here at The Hadley School for the Blind. Take care and I’ll see you next time.

Host

For more from the iFocus Series, along with many other topics of interest to individuals with vision loss, visit the Seminars@Hadley page at The Hadley School for the Blind website –