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Your weekly dose of information that keeps you up to date on the latest developments in the field of technology designed to assist people with disabilities and special needs.
Thanks to all our listeners and staff members who contributed to this episode.
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www.gatfl.org/favorite-search.php
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Next week we will be back to our regular format of news and interviews about assistive technology
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WADE WINGLER: Hi, I’m Wade Wingler with some iOS tips and tricks, and this is your Assistive Technology Update.
WADE WINGLER: Hi, this is Wade Wingler with the INDATA Project at Easter Seals crossroads in Indiana with your Assistive Technology Update, a weekly dose of information that keeps you up-to-date on the latest developments in the field of technology designed to assist people with disabilities and special needs.
Welcome to episode number 268 of Assistive Technology Update. It’s a special episode scheduled to be released on July 15, 2016.
Today we are going to talk about iOS tips and tricks, those things on your iPhones and iPads and iPod touches that make them a little more accessible. You called in and left your messages and we’ve also dragged some of our staff members and to ask them about some of their favorite iOS tips and tricks. We’ve got a great episode today.
A couple of things understand: we are recording and releasing this in the middle of July 2016, so some of the things we will talk about are about specific version of iOS or might be related to the time and date of this show. Also, we haven’t heard enough tips and tricks about Android yet to put together a show, but if you have some and would like us to do a show, call our listener line and start leaving us your tips and tricks for Android and we will consider those. You can leave those on our voicemail at 317-721-7124.
Also, it’s great to have tips and tricks, but you also need to know about apps and we have three partner organizations who routinely call app reviews into the show. If you’re looking for apps for iOS, check out BridgingApps.org, AppleVis.com, or search for the Tools4Life app list at Georgia Tech.
And if you are listening to us in the United States and you are not already connected to your local Assistive Technology Act Program, every US state and territory has one. If you want to find your local project, head on over to our website at www.eastersealstech.com/states and you can find your local contact. We have all kinds of great content over at EasterSealstech.com. You can also find us on Twitter @INDATA Project, or call our listener line can’t give us your questions and feedback, at 317-721-7124.
Next week we’ll jump back into our regular format of news and interviews related to assistive technology, but for now and for this week, sit back and relax and enjoy our iOS tips and tricks episode.
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SPEAKER: Hi, this is for David from Easter Seals crossroads, and I have a neat trick to save website as PDFs. You can save any website as a PDF when using Safari. All you need to do is tap the share icon. It looks like a square with the arrow pointing up. Then swipe left and look for “save PDF to iBooks”. It can be viewed in the built-in iBooks app on your phone or sent through messages or email.
***
WADE WINGLER: Charlie Downs is our assistive technology guy in southern Indiana. How are you today, Charlie?
CHARLIE DOWNS: Splendid.
WADE WINGLER: Splendid is a good way to be. We are recording on a Monday. When Monday is splendid, it’s a good day, right?
CHARLIE DOWNS: You betcha.
WADE WINGLER: So what have you got for us for your iOS tip?
CHARLIE DOWNS: Two things that I see would be useful. One is a DB meter which measures the sound in a room. It uses the microphone on your iPhone. Basically there are certain software programs that we utilize that need speech recognition. Sometimes we are in places where they have a fan running or other equipment or the computer makes a lot of noise, and this could influence the accuracy of the speech recognition programs. So to be able to show a visual reference of “you have a lot of noise in this room, we need to cut it back”, it could be helpful. Or if they are in a working environment to just demonstrate they are in very loud working environments.
WADE WINGLER: Great. And you have a particular app you like to use for that?
CHARLIE DOWNS: I went to the App Store, and of course I went for the free ones. There are once you can pay for that might give you a little better visual representation, but basically all you’re doing is watching a meter go up and down. There are about three different levels you usually see in a DB meter, which is low, okay, and then jet engine. Usually it’s green, yellow, and red. Once you go above about 90 dB, you are in a situation where you can have ear damage. The app that I downloaded – and there were a couple of other free ones. I just downloaded this one – was called DB volume.
WADE WINGLER: Like decibels, right?
CHARLIE DOWNS: That would be better. Like I said, it just gives you a visual representation of the ambient sound. It’s using the microphone on your phone, so there may be some directionality of moving the phone around to make sure you’re getting a good reading in all directions. Like I said, it gives the user a visual representation of the ambient sound in a room.
WADE WINGLER: Excellent, thank you so much.
CHARLIE DOWNS: You’re welcome. Have a good day.
***
WADE WINGLER: Justin Amber takes care of our assistive technology equipment lending library. Justin, you got an iOS tip or trick for us?
JUSTIN AMBER: Yeah, this is a battery saving technique. There are just a couple of the simple steps. You go into your settings, and you go into your display and brightness. You can turn on the night shift function. You had to have the most up-to-date version of iOS. You can turn night shift on, and you can also at the same time turn low power mode on. You weren’t able to do this before. You could only have one or the other, so turning both of them on helps you save even more battery if you’re in a bind.
WADE WINGLER: Excellent, great, thank you.
***
ANTOINETTE VERDONE: Hi, this is Antoinette Verdone with ImproveAbility. I’m a rehab engineer and I work with people with disabilities. This is my iOS tip. I’m constantly downloading apps to trial and research for clients. Right now I have 15 pages of apps on my phone. A lot of times I know I’ve downloaded an app, but I don’t know where it is on my device. I found a quick way to launch a particular app. Just flick down on any of the home screens, and it will bring up a search field. From there I can type in the name or part of the name of an app. An icon will come up where I can tap and launch the app from there. You can even customize what comes up in the search results by going to General, and then Spotlight search, and Settings. For me, this is my go to method for launching an app.
***
THOMAS MADDOCK: This is Thomas Maddock and I’m calling about your iOS show you have coming up soon. The tricks I have on the iPhone 6S. I really like the 3D Touch. You can push on an icon and a menu will pop up. It’s a quick way to add a contact. If you go to messages, there is a quick way to send a message.
The other thing I like a lot is called assistive touch. It’s under the accessibility options under general. What it does it put the little menu on the side of your screen, and you can access commonly used items. Also now they have 3-D touch action that you can set to which item you use the most. I have it set for the settings center so I can easily turn on Wi-Fi or Bluetooth without having to mess around with it and use Siri. Those are my tips. Enjoy the day.
***
WADE WINGLER: Jim Reinhardt is our assistive technology guy in northern Indiana. I had to drag him kicking and screaming into the studio. Jim, how are you today?
JIM REINHARDT: I’m doing great, Wade. Thanks for asking.
WADE WINGLER: Jeremy, you have a tip for the iPad or iOS. Tell me what you’ve got.
JIM REINHARDT: I’ve got one that works with voiceover, so those who are voiceover users, whether they have no vision or low vision. A lot of people talk about doing flicks and things like that. This is a little bit different to that. Once you get on the icon and you just use your finger on the icon and kind of drag it around until you find the app that you want, or if you’re moving with an app you can do it that way. Right now I’m on the homepage. What I’ll do is I’ll put my finger on my iPad and you will hear it as I move my finger around on the icon.
[Voiceover calls out various applications]JIM REINHARDT: So if I go down to adjust the page, I can double tap like you always do with voiceover, and then you go on to the other page as well and continue to move around to an app you want.
WADE WINGLER: So the idea is, we are talking about individuals who are blind or visually impaired relying on voiceover. One of the ways is, like you said, flicking from the left or right all the way down through the icons. But that’s not the only way to do it. You can also drag your finger around, relying on that relative positioning of icons and things on the screen and that might be a faster way to access it for some folks, right?
JIM REINHARDT: That could be. One of the gentlemen I’m working with has an Otterbox around the frame of his iPhone that he uses, so he uses the edges of the box as reference point for him. Once he knows that a particular icon within an app is in the lower left-hand corner as you position it with the home button at the bottom.
WADE WINGLER: The nice thing I have discovered is that once you put your finger on something like halfway down the screen and you start flicking, you can take off from that point. So if you get close with your finger just finding it, you can flick forward or flick backward at that point to be able to be a little more discreet. Lots of great options.
JIM REINHARDT: That would be correct.
WADE WINGLER: That’s great. I think it’s a great way to remind people that there is more than one way to navigate voiceover on your iOS device. Thank you so much.
JIM REINHARDT: Thank you, Wade.
***
SPEAKER: This is David from Easter Seals Crossroads and I have a neat trick to help you same voicemails. To save or send a voicemail, you just have to tap the share icon. It looks like a square with an arrow pointing up. You can save voicemails as a voice memo or send it as a message or email.
***
ANN LEMKE: Hi, my name is Ann Lemke. I’m calling from Hawaii. I’m calling regarding the iOS tips and tricks. My recommendation is opening documents with KNFB Reader or Voice Dream Reader. These are both wonderful apps which allow access to email attachments, whether they might be PDF files or some other format.
***
WADE WINGLER: Belva Smith is our team lead on the vision side of the house over here at Easter Seals Crossroads and has been using iOS since it came out. Belva, how are you today?
BELVA SMITH: I’m good, Wade. Thanks for asking me to come in and talk.
WADE WINGLER: I appreciate your doing that. What have you got for tips and tricks today?
BELVA SMITH: Believe it or not, I’m not going to do anything visual. But today what I was going to talk about was in the settings – and you do have to have the latest iOS system, so if you haven’t updated then you want to make sure you do the update — but if you go to settings and look under display, you will see a new option called night shift. If you touch on night shift, you will see that night you can automatically change the displays to a warmer color spectrum. It helps you sleep better – which you shouldn’t be sleeping with your phone anyway — but it’s also good for those folks that may have some visual impairment. You can schedule the time of day that you want it to come on or you can set it to just manually enable itself for tomorrow. You can also adjust the temperature with a slider to less warm or more warm. Again, that is in your settings, display, and then it’s called night shift.
WADE WINGLER: Cool.
BELVA SMITH: The next one I was going to talk about is also under settings. Again, only available in the latest iOS so make sure you’re updated. Under settings, look for the battery. This one I find very helpful because it allows you to switch over to a low-power mode. If you notice that your battery is getting kind of low and it’s going to be a while before you can get to the nearest charger, you can switch on low-power mode and it temporarily reduces the consumption of your battery. Also what I think is interesting in there is you can look at the battery percentage of the different apps and how much battery they are taking up. I just thought that was kind of interesting.
WADE WINGLER: Super helpful. U got one more?
BELVA SMITH: I do have one more. This one is for the folks who are using the notes app, the standard note app that comes with your iOS. With the latest operating system, you can actually secure your notes with – or lock them and have a passcode to unlock them. So if you have – sometimes I do have notes on my phone that are considered private. I can protect those by touching in the top right of the screen for the share button, and then you’ll see the “lock notes”. That gives you the option to use your thumbprint or put in a code to secure your notes.
WADE WINGLER: That’s great. Extra layers of security are always good.
BELVA SMITH: Absolutely.
WADE WINGLER: Thanks so much for stopping by.
BELVA SMITH: You’re welcome. Have a good day.
***
WADE WINGLER: Josh Anderson is our clinical coordinator of assistive technology and a really cool guy. He’s laughing at me because I botched his title.
JOSH ANDERSON: That’s fine. It’s a really long title. I botch it all the time.
WADE WINGLER: Talk to us about iOS a little bit.
JOSH ANDERSON: IOS, I use it all the time, use it for work. One of the tricks I use a lot is the speech. If you go into accessibility, there is a button underneath there called speech. You can enable it. There are two different kinds. Speech selection, where you can highlight text just like you want to copy, cut, those kinds of things and have it spoken to you. Or what I do is speak screen which I can take two fingers, pull down on the screen, and it’s going to read everything to me. For long emails that Wade sent me, it’s nice to have it read back to you. It makes it to where you don’t have to use Siri to read your emails. You can use it for text messages, websites, really just anything that on the screen, it will read it back to you. It’s like to have the auditory feedback.
WADE WINGLER: I use that one when I’m driving home and want to listen to a long email that you might send me.
SPEAKER: Exactly.
WADE WINGLER: Cool. You got another one?
SPEAKER: One other trick, and this has been there for a long time. I’m not really sure people know, but I do have to do a lot because my fingers it going a little bit too fast and I accidentally delete an email that I really wanted to keep. There is something called “shake to undo”. I believe that it automatically is default on, but if you go again to accessibility, then you turned shake to undo on. If you accidentally move your finger too quickly and delete an email, you can just sit there and shake it really fast and it will say undo delete, and you press okay, and magically it is right back. If you accidentally get rid of that important meeting request from Wade to come in and talk about iOS apps and you forget what you’re supposed to be doing, you can shake it really fast and get it back.
WADE WINGLER: My understanding is that undo works in a lot of situations. If you type something and you accidentally delete it, it’s a general undo.
SPEAKER: It really is. It works especially on the one built into iOS. I haven’t had much luck with it with some third-party things but everything built-in it seems to work well.
WADE WINGLER: Josh, thanks a lot.
SPEAKER: Thanks a lot. Have a good day.
***
WADE WINGLER: Anna Leong is one of our assistive technology specialist here at Easter Seals Crossroads, spends a lot of time on iOS, more lately Android as well. Today, you’ve got a few iOS tips to share with us. What have you got?
ANNA LEONG: There is an inclinometer built in and the compass app that is built in an iPhone. The compass app, once to turn it on, usually you will see the North, South, East, West directions and degrees. If you use one finger to swipe from right to left, then you will find two circles overlapping each other. This app is to measure how level your iPhone is with the floor or with a table. If you leveled your phone, the two circles will start to overlap each other. As you move around and find zero degrees showing up, then it means that it is really leveling with the ground, with the table.
WADE WINGLER: Could I use that to hang a picture on the wall?
ANNA LEONG: You can actually do that because you can move your phone vertically to line up with the wall. You can do it both horizontally and vertically.
WADE WINGLER: Excellent. You’ve got another one for us?
ANNA LEONG: Yes. The other one I found is with the new iOS 9, when you go into Safari and if you go into a website, for example Amazon.com, it usually gives you the mobile website. But sometimes there are some differences between the mobile website and a full desktop website. So all you have to do is go down to the share button, it looks like a rectangle with an upward facing arrow, and then you can find a button called “request desktop site”. Once you hit that, then it will show Amazons the stop website.
WADE WINGLER: I had no idea it did that.
ANNA LEONG: It’s a new feature.
WADE WINGLER: Does it seem to work with most websites? Have you had a chance to check it out with a lot of them yet?
ANNA LEONG: Not yet. Especially if you find that some websites have some buttons missing, when you’re using an iPhone or tablet to look at certain websites, if you find that something is different from what you usually see on a computer, try that button, the share button and find request desktop website.
WADE WINGLER: Anna, thank you so much.
ANNA LEONG: No problem.
***
BRIAN MALONE: My name is Brian Malone. I’m going to briefly explain how I use iOS devices to navigate with a visual impairment. Mainly I like iOS devices because they allow me to discreetly access the world. That’s a really cool thing for me. Mainly I do that with my iPhone. I’ve also used it with an iTouch. I’ve been using it for seven or eight years. Mainly I use voiceover for that. The biggest key for using voiceover is to organize your apps in groups. It takes time to get through things with voiceover, so you need to organize them so you can quickly get to what you need to get to. I also use the iPhone or iTouch as a portable CCTV because it’s small, quick, easy to read menus or bus schedules or whatever, however that works. I also use an iPad. The iPad I used a little differently because I have voiceover available with the home button triple tap, but I also use the zoom as much as I use the voiceover. Additionally, I use bold text, larger text size, increased contrast, especially the darker colors. It allows me to get to things and to function in a quick way. These iOS devices are replacing my home computer. It’s my main way to get to Twitter or Facebook Messenger or other things. Thanks a lot. Have a good day.
***
WADE WINGLER: We have in studio our very own Brian Norton, Director of Assistive Technology. Tell us about your favorite iOS tips or tricks.
BRIAN NORTON: I have two favorite tips or tricks for the iPhone. Mainly they center on the fact that if you’ve ever met me before, I’ve got small hands and chubby fingers. Sometimes I’m sure we’ve all had issues on the iPhone trying to get the cursor in the right spot. You are trying to get it at the end of a word or at the beginning of a word or in between words and you just can simply get it in there with your fat chubby thumb as you try to use the touchscreen on there. On the new iPhone, which I believe is the iPhone 6S, you can simply push and hold your finger over the keyboard on the bottom of the screen. That allows you to then simply use it almost as a touchpad on your laptop to be able to move the cursor in and around wherever you wanted to go. I find that extremely useful.
WADE WINGLER: I also suffer from chubby than average fingers and thumbs, but I don’t have the cool newest iPhone, so I’m going to have to take your word on that.
BRIAN NORTON: I think it has something to do with the new screen technology.
WADE WINGLER: Touch force interface or whatever it is.
BRIAN NORTON: I love that. The other one I love is the ability – I believe it is called reachability under settings, under accessibility. If you turn on reachability, with the newer iPhones, they are a lot bigger, so they are five-inch screens instead of four-inch screens. To be able to reach the apps at the very top or to move way up to the top of the screen, my hands just aren’t big enough to get up there. That reachability allows you to double tap the home button on the bottom and basically shrink that screen down. It takes the top half and brings all the way down so you can get to the very top. Then you can double tap to make a go back.
WADE WINGLER: It’s like a light double-tap, not the double-tap you do to bring up your task manager. Just a light double tap.
BRIAN NORTON: You’re not actually pushing the button. You’re just tapping on the button, tapping the top of it. I think it using a little bit of that fingerprint recognition. As you place your finger over top of that, as long as I feel that touch, it will go ahead and bring things down for you.
WADE WINGLER: Very good. Two very helpful things. Thank you so much.
BRIAN NORTON: You’re welcome.
***
WADE WINGLER: So I couldn’t let everybody have all the fun. I’m somebody who uses iOS every day, all day, day in and day out. I had a couple of tips I wanted to share. The first one is – this is pretty simple and it may be something you’re already doing. If you’re not using Siri for dictation, you should. I spent a lot of time sending emails and text messages and those kinds of things from my phone, and I have learned that it sure is easier to a little microphone button next to your entity a lot of things and get them into your phone instead of typing with your thumbs. Even though I use an iPhone 6 Plus and the keyboard is bigger, sometimes my chubby thumbs just don’t do the greatest job. If you’re not using Siri or feel like you’ve had a bad experience with in the past, it keeps getting better, so give it a shot. My other tip is I don’t like having page after page after page of icons on my iPhone or on my iPad. Here is what I do with that. I only have two pages of apps. The first one is my homepage. On the homepage of my iPhone, I just have the 27 most commonly used apps I use day in and day out. I have one icon on every section of my home screen. On my secondary page, I have some groups. The first one is A&B, the second is C&D, and then E&F and G&H and I&J and so on. I just take the apps I don’t use on a very regular basis and sort them alphabetically. That puts them in some sort of an order where I findings when I want to. Most of the time I can think of the name of the app I want and so looking forward alphabetically is no big deal. The other thing is I constantly am doing a down swipe with my thumb on the home screen and searching for the name of the app to launch them that way. That’s a pretty handy way to do that. If you’re one of those people who just have tons of pages of apps, things about alphabetizing them. It took me a while to do it at first, but now I’m not going back. It’s super helpful for me to have all my apps advertised into groups. Those are my tips.
WADE WINGLER: Do you have a question about assistive technology? Do you have a suggestion for someone we should interview on Assistive Technology Update? Call our listener line at 317-721-7124, shoot us a note on Twitter @INDATAProject, or check us out on Facebook. Looking for a transcript or show notes from today’s show? Head on over to www.EasterSealstech.com. Assistive Technology Update is a proud member of the Accessibility Channel. Find more shows like this plus much more over at AccessibilityChannel.com. That was your Assistance Technology Update. I’m Wade Wingler with the INDATA Project at Easter Seals Crossroads in Indiana.
