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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: Like other tablets the iPad is very small
and light with a very long battery. There's 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: 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: My screen reader comes on.
Voiceover: This will be my account of how we got there.
Robin: 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.