Are You Receiving the Accessibility Tips and Tricks?
- Learn to make information accessible to people with disabilities
- Implement what you learn right away
- Understand how people with disabilities use technology
- Receive our monthly newsletter packed with news, articles and updates
- Bonus workbook: Ten steps to a more accessible web site
Do you need help with accessibility? Hire us!
How Do Blind People Use the iPhone?
There is more and more talk about the accessibility of iPhones and iPads. For blind and visually impaired people, it is one of the most accessible devices. But have you wondered how they can access it when all it has is a touch screen?
One of the great advantages of an iPhone is that accessibility features are built in, and people don't have to purchase a separate screen reader. The built in screen reader is called VoiceOver. Any time you purchase an iPhone, all you have to do is hitting the home key three times quickly to start the VoiceOver, and hit the home key three times again to turn it off.
By default, when you touch something on the screen, it becomes activated, which is not necessarily useful when you cannot see the screen. Therefore, VoiceOver adds reading functionalities to the screen. When VoiceOver is on, if you touch the screen you will hear what is under your finger, but the items do not become activated. This way, you can browse the screen with your fingers and understand the layout. When you want to activate anything, you need to double tap on it. For example, on the main screen, when you touch the calendar icon, it will say "calendar". When you tap it twice, it will open the calendar itself.
An additional feature is that you can browse the screen element by element. To do this, you flick once to the right or to the left. This way you can ensure that you reach each element.
Typing is a little complicated, and not necessarily as fast as visual typing. You can set the typing mode to two different settings. The first waits until you find the letter you want to type, hold it for a short time and release it. This way you don't accidentally type letters you don't want. The second way is locating the letter, holding it while tapping anywhere on the screen. While this is a bit slow, many people use an external keyboard when they need to do extensive typing.
There is a gesture for many other things, for example you can go to the first element by touching the top of the screen with four fingers, or to the last one by touching the bottom of the screen with four fingers.
If you want to experience it yourself, just start VoiceOver and try it out!
RE:
I'm using this meohtd in Falsh-based projects as a means to provide additional functionalities in Flash/Flex.For instance, the Datagrid component in Flex is technically accessible, in the sense of I can read it with a screen reader , but very inconvenient in real life, as has been reported by the blind people I work with (using Jaws 8+ on Windows).So we detect if MSAA is triggered and then provide an additional see this in HTML format button so as to give MSAA-enabled users a way to have a plain old, easily-used HTML table in lieu of Datagrid if they need a cell-by-cell reading granularity that the Datagrid does not really fulfill well.
Re:
Try using a later version of JAWS, the current one is 13. Also, NVDA does a great job with Flash and it is free, give it a try.
Re: How Do Blind People Use the iPhone?
I have heard about tactile touch screens coming to smart phones. The one that are available are pretty simple right now, but i think they are eventually going to get to the point where braille will be displayed on the touch screen. That type of technology will extremely helpful to the blind.
Post new comment