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[Andy] Hello and welcome to this short video about the accessibility features of mainstream
smartphones in February 2013. Smartphones are such an essential piece of
our everyday life that it's hard to imagine what we would do without them. We use them
for everything; waking us up in the morning, listening to music, reading eBooks, browsing
the web, sending emails and we still occasionally use them for sending messages and for actually
phoning people and speaking to them face to face.
I'm joined today by Robin and Neil who are two smartphone users who make use of some
of the accessibility features of these phones in different ways. So Robin, if I come to
you first, what do the accessibility features of these phones allow you to do?
[Robin] Well for me as a person with low vision, it really is all about flexibility and having
the ability to customise the appearance of the screen.
[Andy] And Neil, if I come to you, I know you're a big user of these devices but in
quite a different way to Robin. [Neil] Yes, I use a screen reader. One of
the most important things to me, I guess, is the ability to be able to go and buy one
of the devices and actually take it home and set it up out of the box myself.
[Andy] So we're going to move on now to look at the built in accessibility features of
each of the mainstream choices that you'll find on the high street today. We're going
to start off with Apple's iOS operating system. I'm going to go to Robin first to look at
the settings that they have for partially sighted users.
[Robin] Thanks Andy, so if I start off first of all with zoom. It's really simple, we can
turn it on or off and once we've turned it on, the magnification can be activated with
a three finger double-tap on screen. Double-tapping on screen, that turns magnification on and
then double-tap again, it turns it off. Once you've done that a few times, it's really
simple. Double-tap and drag up to turn the magnification on and increase it and then
also to drag down to decrease it. So magnification, it's important to say, works across the operating
system, it'll work in all apps. Second feature down here is the large text
feature. So it allows you to have large fonts across mail, messages, calendar, contacts
and notes. So this will allow you to have either a 20 point font, right up in steps
through to 56 points. What's nice about that is it will allow you to have a large text
experience without necessarily using magnification. We've also got another feature which is called
invert contrast. So there's three really simple features that will be helpful and they're
all built into the operating system. [Andy] So Neil, coming to you. Before we talked
about that sense of excitement that everyone has when you first get a new phone and you're
taking it out of the box. You mentioned that you can set it up independently with speech,
could you explain to us how that works? [Neil] Okay, so when you take your iOS device
out of the box and turn it on, initially it should come up with the setup screen. To turn
on speech, all you is you treble-click the home button - voiceover on - it will automatically
start speaking to you and then you can work your way through the setup process. I'm just
going to show you some of the ways that you can move round the screen. You have two options,
really; you can slide your finger over icons or you can swipe left to right to move along
or you can go back the other way. [Andy] So moving on now, I've heard a lot
about the accessibility of Android devices and I'm going to come to Robin first of all.
We're going to talk about the low vision settings that they've added in recent versions.
[Robin] We're going to take a look at version 4.2, Jelly Bean. In the settings menu, under
display, we've got the opportunity to change the font size and we've got the option to
use small, normal, large or huge. Now in addition to that, and similar to iOS, we've also got
a magnification gesture. We bring on magnification really simply by firstly turning on and then
activate it by using a one finger triple-tap. Once we've moved in, magnified, we use two
fingers to drive around the screen. [Andy] So Neil, coming to yourself, I'm going
to ask you this question again about taking this new, shiny Android device out of the
box. How do you get it speaking to you? [Neil] Right, well this again should be a
simple setup process. You press two fingers on the phone and it asks you to wait and hold
if you wish to enable. Okay, so basically all I've done there is put two fingers on
the screen, possibly a little distance apart from each other and it's asked me if I wish
to enable accessibility mode to keep hold of my fingers there, and up it comes. Now
you're at the setup screen. [Andy] You showed us before how you navigated
around the iPhone, can you now show us how you navigate around this Android phone that
you've got? [Neil] Okay, again this is pretty similar
to iOS. I can place my finger on the screen and I can drag it around and it'll tell me
what items are under my finger or I can alternatively swipe to the right or left and again, it will
tell me what icon is activated. We have another option in Android though; if I go into settings,
for example. Now I know this list, for example, has 22 items, so if I quickly want to get
from top to bottom, I can expand the list kind of like a sighted person would do it,
but with two fingers instead of one. It expands the list so I can see toward the bottom of
it. [Andy] So moving on now, I'm ashamed to say
that I'm behind the technology curve. I've been using a Windows Phone 7 device for about
a year now, which has no accessibility features whatsoever. But I know there's been some improvements
in Windows Phone 8 so I'm going to pass over to Robin now and he's going to take us through
what those improvements are. [Robin] That's right, thanks Andy. So Windows
Phone 8 has a number of features integrated that will help people with low visions. Firstly,
there is a font size adjustment which you can slide from left to right, so you can take
the font up to really quite a large size and that will make it much easier to read. There's
also a high-contrast mode which we can turn on and off and then there's also what we call
the magnifier, Windows magnifier. I can action that by double-tapping with two fingers this
time and then come out of it by two finger, double-tapping. Now like iOS and Android,
we can also adjust the size, the magnification level, and we can make it work so that it
suits your individual needs. So a bit more flexibility in the platform,
but a bit more work to do, it has to be said. [Andy] Neil, unfortunately we can't come to
you with this phone at the minute because my understanding is there is no speech.
So I'm really pleased that for all of the phones that we had here today, we were able
to talk about their accessibility features to at least some degree, but I'm also conscious
that there seem to be some gaps. Guys, what's missing? What needs to be done next?
[Robin] So for me, accessibility needs to be across all the platforms. So every mobile
phone platform should have accessibility built in, out of the box.
[Andy] I completely agree with that. Neil, do you have anything you would like to add
to that? [Neil] I would like to see developers paying
a little bit more attention to documentation and providing that and making it easily available.
[Andy] Okay, thanks for that, Neil, and thanks both for your time today. I've found this
session really useful and I've certainly learnt a lot.
If you'd like to find out more about how RNIB can help you make your operating system or
mobile device more accessible to blind and partially sighted people, please email us
at digitalaccess@rnib.org.uk.