Ipad-film-digital-accessibility



Tablets in the classroom – iPads low vision accessibility

Robin Spinks:

I’m Robin Spinks I work in the digital accessibility team at the Royal National Institute of Blind people. Tablets have had quite a transformative role within education as well as in other areas of our lives over the past couple of years. Joining me to talk about some of the advantages and disadvantages is my colleague Steve Griffiths, Steve.

Steve Griffiths:

Like other tablets the iPad is very small and light with a very long battery. There are also a huge number of apps that are available through the app store which are being vetted by Apple so you know they are going to do what they say they’re going to do. Now crucially finding apps, installing them updating them and removing them, these are all very straightforward processes. That makes the iPad a hugely useful tool. There are limitations for instance many of the apps require wireless connectivity and you can’t always be sure you are going to be on the internet. Typing can be an issue that we’re going to come back to, especially for users of low vision and users with no vision.

Possibly the way in which the iPad is different to most other technologies is that in the way the accessibility features are built into it so strongly. There are a number of accessibility features both for those with low vision and for those with no sight whatsoever. Robin perhaps you would like to talk us through some of the low vision features that are built into the iPad.

Robin Spinks:

All of the accessibility features are found in the settings menu. The accessibility menu is where all of the accessibility features live, but we’re going to start off with looking at a menu called Large Text. Now as the title suggests large texts simply allows you to change certain applications to a larger font size. You can switch some core applications, Notes, Mail, Messages, Calendar and Contacts. In those applications you can change the font so that’s bigger. You can actually set it so that it runs between 20 point and 56 point. So what we’re going to do is, is we’re going to pick 32 point and that means that every time we go into Notes for example we’re going to find the note is displayed in 32 point font.

Moving on from that we can then also use a feature called Zoom. The Zoom feature can be turned on, simply by going to Zoom and turning the switch to on. Once you’ve turned Zoom on, you can then operate it using a gesture. If I double tap with three fingers anywhere on the screen I can drive around that display and read any element of it that I want. That also covers the battery the clock and in the case of cellular eye iPad it will give you signal strength as well. In our case we’ve got no signal. So turn off magnification, double tap with three fingers, magnification goes off, really simple.

So another feature that can be really helpful for people with low vision is the opportunity to invert colours. Now inside the accessibility menu we can find Invert Colours and there is a simple on off switch, the entire screen switches and we have light characters on a dark background.

Although it’s not badged as an accessibility feature there is a particular feature on the iPad that many low vision users will find extremely helpful. It’s a feature called Safari Reader, so where you read the web address, there will be a grey rectangle to the right hand side. It will simply say reader. If we touch that all of the content on the page in terms of links any advertising, it just disappears, and you get a nice letterbox version of the font that you’re reading. If you touching the lower and uppercase letters and the top left of that box, you can then make the font as big as you want. When you no longer require it, you simply touch the reader button and the page reverts to its normal view.

One other accessibility feature is a feature which is called Triple Click Home. Now, what that does is it allows you to assign a function to the home button on the device. You can make that triple click start certain functions. So in my case I’ve chosen to assign Voiceover which is the iPad screen reader to triple click. If I’m reading using my eyes and I want to start reading for example using my ears, I quite simply triple click.

Voiceover:

Voiceover on

Robin Spinks:

My screen reader comes on.

Voiceover:

This will be my account of how we got there.

Robin Spinks:

We can start to use the voiceover screen reader, you can take a look at the tablets in the classroom section of RNIB’s website to find out more, and please don’t forget to get in touch and share your story of where the iPad's worked particularly well, or perhaps where it’s not worked well, in an education setting. We’d love to hear from you. You can email us at digitalaccess@.uk.

Voiceover:

RNIB supporting blind and partially sighted people.

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