Ipad-Film-Video-2

Tablets in the classroom, part 2 of 3 – iPad’s screen reader transcript

Robin Spinks: I’m Robin Spinks, I work as principle manager for digital accessibility at RNIB.

Steve Griffiths: I’m Steve Griffiths, I’m a development officer in RNIB’s digital accessibility team.

Robin Spinks: So as part of our series looking at tablets in the classrooms and looking particularly at the role of the iPad in learning. We’re now going to take a look at some of the features that might be helpful for people who have no useful vision or for whom the primary means of accessing screen based information would be speech, and to do that I’m joined again by Steve.

Steve Griffiths: The speech program that’s built into the iPad is called Voiceover at it allows someone with no sight to move around and do pretty well everything, that someone with sight can do on the iPad. On most iPad’s you can triple click to turn that on, if not you can go into the settings area and change that. When you turn Voiceover on, a little line appears around the top left hand icon on your screen. That’s just telling you what Voiceover is focusing on and speaking about. This can be very useful for teachers for instance, if you have a student who’s using Voiceover, it’s quite possible that they’ll have an earpiece in so that they can hear Voiceover but other people around them can’t, but you as a teacher you can look over their shoulder and see what area of the screen is being highlighted, therefore what Voiceover is reading.

The way that most people begin learning about Voiceover is you just take your finger and put it on the screen and Voiceover will tell you what you’ve touched.

RNIB – supporting blind and partially sighted people Registered charity number 226227 Voiceover: Items, double tap to open.

Steve Griffiths: Even when I get to a blank area of the screen you can hear a little dinging noise, which is basically telling me I’m on the touch sensitive area of the screen, but I’m not actually touching an icon. A second way that I can move around the screen, and this is the way that most people move onto using Voiceover, is first of all touch something on the screen and then from there I can use what are called swipes or flicks. Left and right flicks move me from left and right to the next thing or the previous thing. It’s important that these are either vertical or horizontal and not diagonal swipes.

Voiceover: Calendar to Contacts

Steve Griffiths: Each time I go from one to the other Voiceover tells me what it is. When I get to something I want to work on or activate, I double tap the screen. My double tap can be anywhere and it will still activate that icon. For instance.

Voiceover: Reminders, edit button.

Steve Griffiths: Whenever I go into an app, again the top left of that app, is highlighted with the Voiceover cursor and it’s spoken and then I can navigate through that app in the same way. Because privacy can be an issue, if I’m a person using Voiceover I may not notice that someone is standing looking over my shoulder. So I can do a gesture.

Voiceover: Screen curtain on.

Steve Griffiths:

rnib.org.uk And it turns the screen off, everything is still working, but nothing is visible on the screen. One of the areas that can be problematic using Voiceover and indeed using Zoom, is when you come to type on the iPad. If I go into an app like Notes.

Voiceover: Notes, text field is editing.

Steve Griffiths: It tells me I’ve gone into a text field when I start a new one, a new note, and a keyboard appears on the screen. I can use that keyboard in the way that I’ve used everything else. Which is I can move my finger around a keyboard until I find a letter.

Voiceover: Capital V.

Steve Griffiths: In fact I’ve turned on something called Touch typing, which means that I don’t need to double tap, I just need to take my finger off the letter and it’s automatically entered into my document. It can still take a while to type a document in this way.

A Bluetooth keyboard such as the one I’m holding which is Apple’s Bluetooth keyboard can be connected wirelessly to an iPad, and a lot of people will find this much easier for typing large amounts of information you can also use a braille display. Again it has to be a Bluetooth braille display, unfortunately these are expensive. Another way you can get text into a document is to speak it rather than to type it. In order to do this first of all you need to turn on Siri and then when you go into an area like Notes, you will see a small microphone just to the left of the space bar. I can get to this using Voiceover if I find that and double tap it. I can then speak my message, and then double tap it again and dictate will work out what I’ve said and input it.

Voiceover:

rnib.org.uk Space, dictate.

Steve Griffiths: I’m now dictating a note.

Voiceover: I’m now dictating a notes.

Steve Griffiths: It almost got it right, but that can be a really nice feature, although again you can’t speak huge paragraphs when you do that. You can only speak for about a minute and you do have to vocalise or your punctuation as well. If you have any questions you liked to ask about this, you can always email [email protected].

Voiceover: RNIB supporting blind and partially sighted people.

rnib.org.uk rnib.org.uk