Play Books on an Ipad Mini for Blind Readers

Play Books on an iPad mini for blind users

Welcome to this short video demonstrating some of the accessibility options of Google's Play Books app on an iPad mini.

Narrator: If I turn VoiceOver on on my iPad …

VoiceOver: VoiceOver on

Narrator: … I can go to the Play Books app and open it.

VoiceOver: Play Books. Double tap to open. Play Books. Google Play Books. Heading.

Narrator: The first thing I need to do is move to a book - there's a list of books on the screen and I can swipe through until I get to a book I want and then double tap to open it.

VoiceOver: Inter manage mode, button. Allows you to archive books and delete. Sample of Arc 1.4 forever alone drone by Simon Ings. Breakout, by Richard Stark. Opens the book. Breakout. Four the class was called low impact rhythm and was theoretically a preliminary for classes in ballroom dancing, but was …

Narrator: When the book opens, it opens on whichever page I was on the last time I had the book open. You may have seen - if you can see what's on the screen - there were some menus which appeared above the text of the book and those disappeared after a couple of seconds. But VoiceOver immediately started reading the text that was on the page.

RNIB – supporting blind and partially sighted people Registered charity number 226227 At any point I can pause it by tapping with two fingers, and then start it again by tapping with two fingers again.

VoiceOver: … class with slower music. In addition to Brenda, there were eleven other students here this evening.

Narrator: If I leave this to itself, it would read to the bottom of the screen and read the page numbers that are visible on the screen, but it won't continuously read. By which I mean it won't automatically switch to the next page and carry on reading as happens in some other eBook apps.

When VoiceOver has got to the bottom of the page, I can switch to the next page by swiping left with three fingers and then when I've done that I'll need to tap at the top of the screen in order to get my focus to that area of the screen, and then start reading using the usual two finger swipe down. I'll just quickly demonstrate that.

VoiceOver: Pages 119 to 120 of 305. … Fawcett. Fawcett. Since she seemed to travel with Ed all the time, she might as well be Brenda Fawcett, so a while ago, for a birthday …

Narrator: One last thing that I might want to is, in order to increase the amount of text that appears on a page, and therefore gets read with a single gesture. If I double tap the screen to get the menus:

VoiceOver: Fawcett. Since she seemed to travel with Ed all the time, she might as well be Brenda Fawcett, so a while ago, for a birthday present, Ed had given her various kinds of … Book contents, button. Book settings, button.

Narrator: I can then go to the book settings menu

VoiceOver:

rnib.org.uk Book settings.

Narrator: And decrease the font size

VoiceOver Increase font size, button. Decrease font size button. Decrease font size. Decrease font size. Decrease font size dimmed.

Narrator: And once I've got it dimmed, meaning that the text size is the smallest I can have it at, I can do a two finger scrub - that's a Z gesture on a single line.

VoiceOver: Four the class was called low impact rhythm and was theoretically a preliminary for classes in ballroom dancing …

Narrator: And now although the text is very difficult to read visually on the screen, it does mean VoiceOver can read all that text in a single gesture. And that's as much as you can do.

Whilst it is possible for me to move my finger around the screen and select a word, which is what you need to do if you want to look it up in the dictionary, the dictionary and annotation options are not available to VoiceOver, I'm afraid.

I hope you found this quick introduction to using the Play Books app with VoiceOver useful. Thank you!

This video used an iPad mini running iOS version 7.0.4 and the Play Books app version 1.6.4.9543.

RNIB - supporting blind and partially sighted people

rnib.org.uk