Re: getting a new iPhone, some help needed, please
Hi,
Sooner or later you will have to buy a smartphone, so, in my opinion there is no point in giving up. It’s true that you will have to learn a new type of OS from scratch, but this doesn’t have to be so difficult and discouraging just based on your first experience. When I got my touch screen device, which was a Samsung running android, I didn’t have a clew how it worked, I spent hours listening to podcasts and reading lots of pages and also asking several questions on mailing lists, but they made absolutely no sense to me. I bought my phone and asked my brother to describe everything on the screen. Then, without no choice, I was in need of reading a tutorial how android worked, and by the time I learnt that there are gestures like shortcuts on windows, the process of using the phone became less complicated. Then I bought myself an iPhone 6, and I noted a major difference between the two operating systems in terms of accessibility. iOS was far too accessible compared to android. Voiceover is very helpful and when you buy your phone, you’ll notice that it is very instructive and, after all, absolutely one of the best screen readers for both mobiles and computers. I am saying this because someone might persuade you to go for an android device, but do not fall for it. Voiceover is like Jaws or NVDA in terms of helpfulness and feedback. For example, if you touch an element on the screen, voiceover will announce it and after some seconds it will instruct you to double tap to open/activate/toggle it. Also, when you are on facebook, let’s suppose, and you touch the screen under which there is the name next to whom is the post, voiceover will instruct you to double tap with two fingers to interact with the story.
Getting back to your questions, brail keyboard is already installed on iOS, and you do not need to install anything to get it working. I don’t know how it works on windows because I have never used it there, but the keyboard is similar to American brail I think. Changing the language of the keyboard to another will lead to changing the brail keyboard as well. Voiceover does not lock the phone in portrait mode, and if it does, when you activate the brail keyboard, it will change the position of the device into landscape mode automatically. However, brail keyboard has two modes. This landscape/table tap mode, and screen away mode. The table tap mode sets the position of the phone to landscape, and you use three fingers per hand to reach the six dots. You locate dots 1, 2 and three with the fingers of your left hand, and dots 4,5,6 using the fingers of your right hand. To make it clearer, dots three and four should be reached by index fingers. There is also the screen away mode where you put fingers in front of each other. So, the three fingers of each hand stand in front of each other. This, being said, the index finger of your left hand, should be in front of the index finger of the right one. This mode is suitable for iPhones with a small screen, typically from iPhone 4S to iPhone 5s. Changing the mode of brail from table tap to screen away mode is done by swiping/flicking with three fingers twards the bottom of the screen, which should correspond with the homebutton. Do not forget, When your device is set to landscape mode in brail, the homebutton must be into your left.
As I told you yesterday, there are two modes appropriate for voiceover users. The first is standard typing which requires you to find the letter you want to enter, then double tap to type it, and direct typing, which requires you to find the letter and release the finger to type it. There is also typing feedback that has to do with the way you hear the characters. It is again similar to jaws or NVDA. You can hear both characters and words, only characters, only words, or nothing. Of course, you will hear the letter when you touch it, but when you double tap or release the finger to type the letter, it will not be uttered anything by voiceover apart from the sound of keyboard. I didn’t see any bug on iOS, so everything is OK at the moment of speaking.
Cheers!
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