2014-11-19-iFocus 8
Seminars@Hadley
What’s New in iOS 8
Presented by
Douglas Walker
Moderated by
Larry Muffet
November 19, 2014
Larry Muffet
Welcome to Seminars at Hadley.My name is Larry Muffet. Im a member of Hadleys Seminars Team and I also work in Curricular Affairs. Today’s seminar topic is‘iFocus 8; What’s New in iOS 8’.Our presenter today is a familiar one to Hadley students and to regular seminar participants; Douglas Walker. Douglas as a technology guru, and is the master of the touch screen, and is as well a veteran instructor for Hadley. So today Douglas is going to be sharing some tips and pointers with you oniOS8. So without any further ado, welcome Douglas, and let’s get underway.
Douglas Walker
Alright, and here we are with our final iFocus of 2014, and we have a lot of new things to cover in today’s seminar. We’ve been given the new iOS 8 operating system with some really great new accessibility features. Of course, any time we have a major update to iOS we’re bound to have some initial glitches. However Apple has always been really great at identifying any of these issues and fixing them with an eventual update. So the sky is not falling and fear not, because if you are having some glitches, chances are Apple is already addressing it and a fix will be coming probably in the next couple of months.
With that being said, how about we take a look at all of these new accessibility features. So we’re going to have two segments in today’s seminar. In our first segment, we’re going to look at the new Low Vision features, and then we’ll open things up for a few questions. In our second segment today, we’ll check out some of our new additions to voice over. Of course, we’ll have plenty of time for questions after that. So let’s go ahead and jump right in.
Alright, in the past we have kind of been a bit limited in our Low Vision accessibility features. However, Apple has really stepped things up in iOS 8. We now have a lot more control over not only the magnification size but also how we access these magnification features. So let’s take a look at exactly where these can be found. Now we’re using the new iPhone 6 Plus for todays demonstration, so if you’re using an iPad your screen might appear just a little bit different. You’ll have a panel view instead of a single list view. But fear not, because all of the same Low Vision features will still be present.
Now just understand that what you’re seeing might have just a bit of a different appearance for you. Okay, we’ll first need to launch our settings menu to find these new features. So we’ll just touch ourSettingsicon. There we go, and here we are in a list of our settings content area. Now we would typically head right to ourGeneralbutton and then head on in toAccessibilityto find our Low Vision stuff. However some of our accessibility features are beginning to kind of sneak out of theAccessibilityarea and are aiming up in more of, for lack of a better word, our mainstream settings, I guess.
Now, if we move on down this list just below ourGeneralbutton we have a new button calledDisplay and Brightness.It was previously calledWallpapers and Brightness.NowWallpapershas its own area andDisplay and Brightnessare where we can find some really great Low Vision features.So we’ll just activate our newDisplay and Brightnessbutton to see what we have, and we’ll just touchDisplay and Brightnesshere to open it up. We just did that, here we are.
Now at the top of this page, we’ll find some features that we’ve seen before. We have ourBrightnessslider for adjusting our brightness here, and just below this we find theAuto Brightnessbutton that we’re already familiar with. Now, if we have a new iPhone 6 or 6 Plus, we have an additional button on this screen now, and this button is calledView.Now activating this button gives us the ability to choose between two totally different screen views for us. These views can also be very important for VoiceOver users as well and we’ll discuss that in just a bit.
Okay, let’s go ahead and activate our view button to see what we’ll find here. And we’ll do just that, I’ll just touchViewhere. Now what we see on this page is of course ourBackbutton on the top left here, but just below this we have two other buttons, and these areStandardandZoomedbutton. Now if we chooseStandard, the view of our screen is going to be the typical default view for your iDevice. However if we chooseZoomedthen all of the icons and the text on your screen becomes slightly larger.
This also happens with the text that is in our menus and in other applications likeMessages, Safari, and evenMail.All of the text appears to be just a bit larger and more bold, and a little bit easier to see. We’re even given, on this page, some screenshots of howStandardorZoomedare going to appear. So if we choose ourStandardbutton, and then flick our screen to the left and right we’re able to move through these different screenshots of different applications here. If we choose ourZoomedbutton, and then right and left flick,we’re able to compare the differences here.
Alright, so if we decide we prefer theZoomedview, we’ll need to make sure that we have thisZoomedbutton on the screen selected, and we’ll know that we do because it’s going to become highlighted or turn blue once we’ve selected it there. Okay, so once we have it selected, we’ll need to activate theSetbutton at the top right of our screen here. Now when we do this, we’ll be prompted that our device needs to restart in order to make our zoomed view available throughout our device here.
Now, we need to take it one more difference betweenStandardandZoomedview before we leave this view area, because there’s something that’s a bit different, at least in the iPhone 6 Plus and 6 than in the earlier iPhones. And this is the fact that the iPhone 6 or 6 Plus has what’s called panels if you are inStandardview. Like I said, these are visible if you’re inStandardmode and when you go into landscape. So if you turn your device on the side or to the side, youre in landscape mode. Now if you aren’t familiar with panels, panels are what we have on our iPads. These are like the two lists that we have, say if we’re in ourSettingsor if we’re in apps such asMailorMessages.
So if you like these panels when you’re in landscape mode, then you’ll want to maybe keep your device in standard view if you need more information on the screen. However for some of us, and in particular VoiceOver users, these panels can sometimes be a bit challenging to navigate. If that’s your case then you’ll want to set it fromStandardintoZoomedview so that you can get rid of these panels when you’re in landscape mode.
Alright, so that being said, let’s go ahead and back out of ourViewoptions and head back into ourDisplay and Brightnesssettings here. Now at the bottom of this screen, and remember we’re on ourDisplay and Brightnesssettings, we’ll find that our Text size and bold text settings have now found their way here. So this is an example of how ourAccessibilitysettings are beginning to sort of creep out of ourAccessibilityarea. NowText SizeandBold Textaren’t new to iOS 8. But we still need to know that they’ve moved, and they are now under ourDisplay and Brightnessarea.
Okay, so now let’s go ahead and move out of ourDisplay and Brightnesssettings and check out some more of our new Low Vision features. So we’ll just activate ourBackbutton to back, and we’re just touching the top left there. Our accessibility settings are of course under ourGeneralbutton. So we will activate ourGeneralbutton here, and I just did that. Remember we’re not hearingVoiceOver speak now because we’re just discussing our new Low Vision features in this segment. We’ll be talking about VoiceOver in our next segment of todays seminar.
Okay, now lets activate ourAccessibilitybuttons so I’ll just touchAccessibilityhere. Okay, so here we are in all of ourAccessibilitysettings, and we’re looking at our new Low Vision features again. So we’ll first head to ourZoomedsettings. Okay, so lets activate ourZoomedbutton, and we just did that. Now we’ll notice that the top of ourZoompage hasn’t changed at all because we still have our On/ Off button that we’re used to at the top of screen here, and we have some simple directions to sort of help us start using zoom. However we have a wealth of new features throughout the rest of our screen here. Now if we look just below ourZoomedinstructions here, that’s always been there, we find aFollow Focusbutton. It’s an On/ Off switch here, and this has been a much needed feature for us.
Now if we activate thisFollow Focusbutton, this On/ Off switch here, the focus will now follow our cursor. The focus of the screen is going to follow the cursor as we type. And this works great in apps such asNotes, orMail, orMessages, or anywhere that might have a text area that we’re in. Now notice that when we turn it on, if we touch theOnbutton there, and I just did that, we now have another On/Off button appear just below thisFollow Focusbutton. And this button is calledZoomed Keyboard.This is really great because if we leaved this turned off, whenever we have a keyboard visible only the text area is going to be magnified and our keyboard is going to remain the same size. So we’ll be able to see our entire keyboard, and that is pretty great.
Now if you want for the keyboard to be magnified as well, like it always has been in the past, activating this On/Off button will turn that on. However, it really is nice now to have the ability to leave the keyboard the same size and have the top portion of the screen, or just the text area of our screen, magnified. You know theFollow Focusreally is a much needed addition and is really a great feature to have now.
Okay, so our next new feature on this page is called theController.Now if we turn on ourControllerbutton, there’s an On/Off switch here, and if we turn it on we’re given a small floating icon on our screen that’s visible on our desktop here and it’s visible across all of our apps. So it remains kind of floating above everything here on the screen. It’s like a little icon. It really gives us a new way of being able to interact with all of our Zoom features. Now our limited time today is going to kind of keep us from going into all of ourControllerfeatures here. However we do have a new ‘Using Zoom’ YouTube video on our Hadley YouTube channel and it allows us to go really in-depth with all these new Zoom features including the controller big time.Now we’ll discuss at the end of today’s seminar exactly how to get to our YouTube videos.
Okay, so with this little floatingControllericon we now have the ability to access all of our Low Vision options. If we just touch it once, up pops a dial up box or a pop-up menu here. And it gives us all of our Low Vision features for wherever we are on our device. This is really great because in the past we’ve had to go all the way back into our settings to get to our Low Vision features. So let’s go ahead and tap this controller to see what kind of options we’re able to see here. So I’ll just tap our controller once or touch it once. Alright, now we’ve been presented with a pop-upZoommenu here. This is our zoom menu with some features in it.
Now Window users would know this is a dial-up box. It pops up on the screen, and in this pop-up menu we see that we have the ability of course to zoom in and out. There’s a button that allows us to zoom in and out. Just below that we have the ability to go into what’s calledWindows Zoommode. This means that we can now choose to only magnify a portion of the screen and leave the rest of our screen unmagnified if you want to. It’s almost like having a small handheld magnifier, just kind of sitting right on our screen here. We can also resize the zoom window to make it whatever size we need.
The next button on the list is aChoose Filterbutton. This is great because in the past we’ve only have the option or the ability just to invert the colors. However, we now have three other filter options under thisChooseoption area here. We haveGrayscale, Invert Grayscale,and alsoLow Light,which is really great. Alright, from this pop-up menu we also have the ability either to show or to hide our little controller, our floating controller here. The last thing in this pop-up menu is a slider, and this slider allows us to really be able to control our magnification level by just sliding it to the left to decrease the magnification, or sliding it to the right to increase our magnification there.
Our controller really does give us so much more control over our Low Vision features. However we’re still able to access the screen using all of those magnification gestures that we’ve used in the past and that we come to know and love. So if you do wish to hide the controller that’s okay because we’re still able to bring up this Low Vision or this Zoom pop-up menu here by performing just a three finger triple tap on the screen. And how cool is that, because we can just make it jump right up there are get into it without having to have that controller up there.
Okay, so let’s head back to the Zoom settings here and look at a couple more Low Vision options that we have just withinZoom.The first of these is calledZoom Region,and this does exactly the same thing that we mentioned earlier when we were talking about the zoom window. It allows us to choose between a full screen view, like we’ve known in the past, or only have a portion of the screen magnified. Now this is something that you going to have to kind of need to play around with, to see exactly what work best for you.
Alright, so the last new item under ourZoomsettings here is a slider control, and this allows us to set a maximum zoom level for our device. Now this is particularly great on our iPhone rather than our iPad. We’re having too much magnification, so if we’re magnified too much, it really just blows everything off the screen. So we can set exactly how large we want this magnification to become.
Alright, that pretty much is it for our new zoom features, and remember we have that new zoom video on our YouTube channel. We’ll talk about how to get to it in just a bit. So now, we do have one more new Low Vision accessibility feature that we sort of need to explore, and this is our newSpeak Screenoption. Now we’ll need to move out of our zoom settings in order to check this out or in order to find this. So let’s activate our back button in the top left corner of our screen here, and we’ll move back to all of our accessibility settings. So there you go, we’re back in ourAccessibilitysettings here.
Alright, now if we look about half way down our screen we see a new area calledSpeechand we’ll just activate this button to check out some of our new speech options here. So I’ll just touchSpeechthere. Alright, so at the very top of our screen is an option that’s not new, and this is ourSpeech Selectionoption. This feature allows us to select a portion of text and then have it read aloud to us, which is great. Well now, we have an additional option here and it’s just below this. This called theSpeak Screenoption.
Now turning this feature on gives us the ability to have an entire screen read to us. Again, this can be great if you’re in a long email, of it you’re using your reader to read an article in Safari. Now if we turn this option on here by activating this On/Off switch we’ll just turn it on, we’re on a webpage that we want to be read aloud, all we have to do is flick down the screen with two fingers and our speech will begin reading the screen from the top.
Now we’ll have a small player control appear on the top of the screen, and this allows us to do a couple of things. We can, of course,PauseandPlayour speech from that little controller, and we also have the ability to jump forward and backwards through our text that we’re reading. We also have the ability to speed up or slow down our speech. So it gives us a little bit of control in this little player that sort of pops up on the screen, and we do it all right from that little player controller there. That really is a great new Low Vision feature. It’s the ability to just read the entire screen for us, and it can really help to reduce some eye fatigue for us there.
Alright, well I think that just about does it for all of our new Low Vision features. So how about we open things up for a few questions and I’ll hand the microphone back over.
Larry Muffet
Yeah, apparently the PC got a little bit locked up so I’m going to release the microphone. People that want to queue up and ask a question to Douglas, go ahead and jump in.
Caller
Yes this is Allen Lenley. Back to your point about the panels, and I guess theDisplay and Screensettings betweenStandardandZoomed. I am a VoiceOver user so I got a little confused. You said the panels can be a little tricky for VoiceOver users. They seem like they come into play only when you’re in landscape mode. So what if you’ve got your phone locked in portrait mode, do they never show up? I’m not running iOS8 yet but I’m trying to learn about it. So I’m just trying to make plans for it and want to make sure I get that setting right so I don’t get whips all about. Thanks.