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Your weekly dose of information that keeps you up to date on the latest developments in the field of technology designed to assist people with disabilities and special needs.
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Twitter @applevis
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Thomas Domville:
Hi, this is Thomas Domville. I’m an AppleVis editorial team member with AppleVis.com, and this is your Assistive Technology Update.
Josh Anderson:
Hello, and welcome to your Assistive Technology Update, a weekly dose of information that keeps you up to date on the latest developments in the field of technology, designed to assist individuals with disabilities and special needs. I’m your host Josh Anderson with the INDATA project at Easterseals Crossroads in beautiful Indianapolis, Indiana.
Josh Anderson:
Welcome to episode 437 of Assistive Technology Update. It’s scheduled to be released on October 11th, 2019. On today’s show we’re super excited to have Thomas Domville on from AppleVis, and he’s going to tell us all about some of the new accessibility features in iOS 13. If you’d like, send us an email at tech@Eastersealscrossroads.org and let us know your favorite new features in iOS 13. Now let’s go ahead and get on with the conversation
Josh Anderson:
So here we are at the beginning of October. The seasons are starting to change maybe where you are, I’m not sure, it’s still pretty hot here. But the days are starting to get shorter, and it also means that Apple has released a new operating system for both iPhone and iPad. iOS 13 and iPad iOS 13 came out a few weeks ago and introduced a lot of improvements and new accessibility features, and some of them are pretty cool. Well we’re lucky enough today to have Thomas Domville from AppleVis on to help us sort out some of the new features and how they can help. Thomas, welcome to the show.
Thomas Domville:
Hi, thank you for having me on, this is a great honor and pleasure.
Josh Anderson:
You know, it’s a great honor and pleasure to have you on, I think, as I was kind of telling you before on our sister show ATFAQ, we definitely send a lot of folks to AppleVis when they have questions about iOS. Because while we like to think we might be experts in something, when you got a community like you guys have, we kind of have to concede to the real experts. Before we get into talking about those exciting new additions to iOS 13, could you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself and about AppleVis?
Thomas Domville:
Absolutely. Well, first of all I am a contractor for the state of Missouri, so I represent and work with a number of agencies such as rehab services for the blind, Missouri Assistive Technology, and their VA for the state. So I help and educate and train people that are low vision and blind learning how to use their computer systems such as JAWS, ZoomText, the Mac with voiceover, all sorts of things. So that’s my daytime job.
Thomas Domville:
Now, my hobby and my nighttime job pretty much is an editorial team member, which is basically I’m one of 18 members that we work with AppleVis.com. And let me explain what AppleVis.com is first and then I’ll kind of tell you a little bit of what I do with them. AppleVis.com is a community based website for those with low vision and that are blind, they can come, that if you own any type of Apple products, you don’t have to actually own something, but if you’re interested or… it’s a place where you can come, find, learn, educate yourself, listen, everything Apple related products.
Thomas Domville:
So if you have an iPhone, great site to come. We have various things like blogs, we have forms, we have podcasts, we have guides and tutorials, everything you could possibly think of under the rainbow when it comes to Apple products. So it’s a great resource, not only to come and learn, but also to interact with other people, because there are people there to kind of bang ideas off too and share new findings that you have. If you find an app that you absolutely must share with other people, and things like that.
Josh Anderson:
Well I know one of my favorite things that you guys do is you talk about bugs. You talk about issues with new updates and stuff like that, and that’s always been a huge help, especially when I’m trying to tell the folks that I work with whether they should update or not. Because I usually tell them, maybe wait until a few of those are fixed, so I know that’s a huge service to folks.
Thomas Domville:
It is our most popular time in the year, unfortunately, good or bad, because when a major iOS comes out, everybody wants to know. And not just iOS, but your watch, your TV, your Mac, all sorts of things. But the iOS seem to be the most popular one that people want to come and just basically find out if it’s safe to update. Is it safe, what can we expect with the new version? And there’s generally a lot of inquiries about a lot of different things when a new major version comes out.
Thomas Domville:
So I think is a great place to come. We try to list all the things that we have found, now obviously it’s not everything that is out there, but that’s the beauty of the community basis that they’ll add more things to the pile that we might have missed. So it was a great resource to come and find out all the new things you could find
Josh Anderson:
Well we’ve started off by talking about the bugs. Let’s talk about maybe that later, if we have time, because there’s a lot of new things to talk about with iOS 13. So let’s start by talking about the changes to voiceover. What’s new with voiceover?
Thomas Domville:
Well, I’ll just kind of focus on the big ones that I really love myself. Now there’s been a lot of popular talk about voice control. Voice control is a new feature that allows you to control your device by using your voice. This is a new feature that is only exclusively in iOS 13 that is gaining a lot of traction with people. Not just low vision or blind people, but every walk of life that might have some sort of a disability and not being able to use their hand or fingers or limbs to be able to navigate around with your smartphone. And voice control is beautiful because it works great with voiceover as well. So you use it specifically, you just use your voice to navigate around. So you can just go open app store, and you can go left, right, and double tap. And you just use all the magic of your voice to perform the different various actions.
Thomas Domville:
So that is probably the big one. That’s the most popular one and a lot of people are looking into. Some of the other, one of my favorites is the ability to customize voiceover gestures. So yes, all these gestures that we have learned to come to love, swipe left, right, but sometime it comes with headaches and pain because some maneuvers can be very difficult for some people. Like for myself, it is incredibly hard for me to do three fingers quad tap. I mean, just to be able to do this is like, I have to think about it before I do it, and then I have to tap and then I have to think how many times I have done it. And so some of these gestures can be difficult for some people and they just can’t get it down pat. And that’s the beauty of this new voiceover gesture is that you can customize that to make things simpler for you now.
Thomas Domville:
For example, let’s just say the rotor [inaudible 00:07:02], that’s a hard one for a lot of people because you have to use two fingers to turn like a dial, and I even have difficulty with that. So I never did that way, I always had a unique way of how I train people how to use it. But now, I can assign it to two fingers swipe left to go through each the element of the rotor, which makes it so much easier.
Josh Anderson:
Oh yeah.
Thomas Domville:
I even have a heading, so when I go to a website, instead of having to use the rotor to go to headings, because often more than not, we have to go back, change back the headings, swipe down, down, down, and then all of a sudden it loses it’s action, we have to go back. And now I’ve assign that to a gesture. So there’s lots of ways you can do things with them.
Thomas Domville:
There is voiceover activities, which is a big plus for a lot of people. Think of this as a preset. Lets just say voiceover, you are able to control the speech rate, the person that you’re hearing, the punctuation, how things are pronounced, blind users that use braille displays can make the modification, how they want that to work. And so these are defined customized presets. So they call them activities. So we can have, let’s just say, four different activities that do four different things. So I have this one for when I read things, so when I want to read a book, because I like to have the speed rate slower and I like to have a different voice. Or this activity is for just everyday use, and this one is great for on the web.
Thomas Domville:
So those are the top three things I like when it comes to terms of voiceover. Now of course there are many, many, many, many more things available in 13 in terms of features with voiceover users.
Josh Anderson:
Well I know those are definitely some of my favorites too, and yeah, the custom configurations and controls. That’s just a big game changer, because I know most folks I work with, we’d learn the rotor and they’d be like, oh that’s great, that’s really helpful. But they never really want to use it. Because like you said, it’s not real easy to get two fingers and kind of get that circular motion and everything, and yeah, like you said, some swipes and stuff like that can be really difficult. So being able to set those up on your own for what’s easy for you, especially for the things you use a lot, that’s a pretty big game changer.
Thomas Domville:
Oh no doubt. No doubt. Sometimes we only use certain things in the rotor, and then when we want to use it often, like I mentioned the headlines, so I use that more times than others. Some people might find they use the edit more often, so you can assign all these so you don’t have to keep finding it within your rotor. Because sometimes that can be confusing for a lot of people to explain what the rotor is and what’s in the rotor. And not only that, but as you may know that some things may appear in certain circumstance and other times it doesn’t show up. And so it’s hard for new users to grasp when can I find this and when can’t I find it? And so that learning curve can be quite steep. So making it simpler and easier for people is, I think, the idea behind the customized voiceover gesture.
Josh Anderson:
No, I think that’s great, it sounds like they’re actually listening to some of their users about that one. Now moving on from voiceover, there’s also some new settings that can help people who are maybe low vision with being able to access the screen. What are some of those new features?
Thomas Domville:
Some of the low vision aspect of things is now they offer dark mode. Now I have heard mixed reviews about dark mode. There are some, you know, when I had low vision back in the days, I actually loved things being dark. I always loved black with either a yellow… so some people, they all have various ways they like it, and dark mode, to my thought, would be quite beneficial for those that like to have a dark background. Now it’s not completely black. Dark modes just basically means it has a hue of gray to black color that’s going on.
Thomas Domville:
So some low vision people really love this because it’s a lot easier on the eyes, it’s not so blurry, and it’s easier to read. And there’s others that do not like the new feature simply because they liked the light mode, they are able to see it a little bit better. But the beauty of this is that you have the option to choose between dark or light mode.
Thomas Domville:
Now some of the problems we’re having with this is the smart invert that allows you to invert what you’re seeing on the screen, and it’s pretty jarring and frequently enough that when you’re on dark mode, that it will come up in certain areas real bright for a couple seconds or always, and it is very annoying, and I can imagine that myself. And so that’s probably one of the biggest complaints that we have with 13, but I hope over time, and when 13 gets more mature, that that also gets hammered out with the issues with that being so jarring. And because it takes several seconds to go from dark to the smart inverse, so that in between times is where we’re having a lot of problems with that. So that’s probably the biggest new things for low vision folks.
Josh Anderson:
Yeah, and hopefully that’s something they’ll work out. I know I’ve been using a Mac for a while and dark mode has been in there for quite some time, and I like it, just happened to be on the computer all the time. But I know it only worked with certain things when it first came out, so you’d open up another program and it would just be completely bright white, and depending on what kind of environment you’re working in, like you said, that can be pretty jarring. But they fixed a lot of those things so hopefully, hopefully iOS will catch up and be able to do that too.
Thomas Domville:
Yeah. And like you said, I think it’s more the developers that people need to remember is that this will only work on Apple products itself. So the home screen is fine and all, but if you want to open up a secure app that hasn’t implemented the dark mode, then it’s like, oh whoa. And then all of a sudden you’re having to deal with everything very bright and light. So it’s going to be a process that we will soon hopefully have lots of the apps that we come to love will convert over and using adept, meaning that as soon as you open it up, it recognizes you have dark mode on and I’ll switch over. A lot of people are doing that already, but it is a slow process.
Josh Anderson:
Now I know you kind of already touched on this a little bit, and no big update is ever perfect, especially at the beginning. Besides the smart invert, what are some of the other most annoying parts that you’ve heard of?
Thomas Domville:
Really with the low vision I have not heard anything much and when it comes to 13, other than the smart invert in the dark mode situation.
Josh Anderson:
Good.
Thomas Domville:
Obviously we still have the previous items where if you keep it on light mode, that you are able still to keep those older features where you are able to invert the screen and keep it the way that you loved it. It’s just for those, with going into dark mode, is where you’re going to see big differences.
Josh Anderson:
And Thomas, there’s other features in there that maybe aren’t quite accessibility features, but are still really cool and really great. Isn’t there something built in now that’s supposed to help out with robocalls and those kinds of things?
Thomas Domville:
One of my favorites, yes, there are several general mainstream features, we like to call them, that it helps everybody. And one of that is silence unknown caller. So as Americans, we come to hate spam calls and robocallers, and we are just getting hammered all the time. So this new feature, silence unknown caller, if anybody is not on your contact list, it will automatically send them directly to your voicemail, which is absolutely awesome. And however, myself, sometimes that can be a mixed blessing because I receive a lot of calls from clients and things that may not be on my contacts, so I will miss their call.
Thomas Domville:
So people that are business oriented may not be able to use it, but as general personal users, I think you will absolutely love it because that way it will pat down all those callers that you just hate to answer or you see the number and you’re like, who is this? I’m not answering. I can just bet you it’s going to be a robocall caller, and sure enough it is. And so it’s just nice to have that feature in there.
Josh Anderson:
No, it really is. And I run into the same issue because I work with consumers all over the entire state of Indiana, but it seems like robocalls of course are smart enough to look like they’re from kind of close. So I kind of started doing this a while ago, but just not answering if I didn’t know, and knowing that if it was someone I worked with, hopefully they’d leave me a message, I could get right back to them. But when those robocalls first started out, it was every other call, if not every first call, and I was lucky if I actually got the consumer call to ever get through. So that’s awesome that they built that in. I know that’s a big push in a lot of the States too, is to try to get rid of those, so I’m glad that’s being built into there.
Thomas Domville:
Oh, no doubt. I mean, as you just stated yourself is that we find ourselves, and if you think about it, well, I’m not going to answer it. Well, you’re doing the same thing what silent unknown caller is doing too, but you’re not simply not giving the option to leave a message either. So that can come quite a bit in handy there.
Thomas Domville:
I think the other big feature that a lot of people are going gaga about is the QuickPath, which is slide to type. That is probably another big one a lot of people either love or hate it. It’s a love hate thing, because basically what it does is QuickPath allows you to just drag your fingers around. Right now I use touch type, and so that means I have to touch the letter, each letter, let up, let up, let up. And that’s how we read out the text messages or email, or sometime we dictate. But this new item is a builtin keyboard that’s in every iOS 13 with your iPhone. It allows you to type words without having to lift and press each word. So if I’m looking for Thomas, so in other words, I would hold down the letter T, and you wait for the indicator, and you just slide your finger around like you’re trying to find H and then O and then M, A, S. And you’re sliding the whole time.
Thomas Domville:
And as you’re doing this, you’ll hear words that starts to pop up. So it think at first I’m doing there, because there’s T, H. And then it says, O, and then it says, oh, maybe it’s though. And then it goes to M and it says, oh, it’s Thomas. And the idea behind this is that it really does save keystrokes. So a lot of times there may be five letters in a word, and I only have to move around by three letters, and by that time it sees the whole word. So it saves me two keystrokes. And you can do the whole sentence in this way. There is a steep learning curve to use this, which I will forewarn everybody, it can be a mixed bag of results because more times than not, when you first to use it, it doesn’t come out with the word you want and you have to delete it. And it’s just like, oh, it’s just so frustrating I want to pull my hair out. But once you get the hang of it, it’s really kind of a cool deal.
Josh Anderson:
Nice. And that’s one thing, I’ve tried to use it a little bit, and I have not tried to use it with voiceover before, because I wasn’t real sure how that would work. But I have got to try it out a little bit and it is kind of neat, but you’re right, there is a lot of trial and error, because you don’t realize how close a lot of those letters are for the different words. And I know at least in my case, it can be a little annoying because if you deleted it, it kind of deletes the whole thing, you have to start all over, or deletes the whole word. You have to start typing it all over again. I know that can get a little annoying for folks.
Thomas Domville:
It can, but to some, just to let you know that this is turned on by default, there are some settings and tweaks you can make to it to make it not kick in as quickly. There are some tweaks that allows, you instead of deleting the whole word, if you… let’s just say I spell the word the, T-H-E, and somebody wants thee, T-H-E-E, you can actually, there’s a setting in there say to leave this alone and they can actually backspace or put an extra E or whatever have not. So there are a number of tweaks you can do that to make your experience much more pleasurable.
Thomas Domville:
The other big ones, I’m surprised this is such a big deal, but a lot of people that are blind loves to listen to radio. The radio is kind of a big deal, and I, for one, listen to radio every Sunday when of my NFL local team comes up and I want to listen to my football game, and now I can just tell Siri, say hey, play 101 The Fox, which is our local station here, which is 101.1 The Fox. And so if you know the dial number and the call sign of The Fox, or 96.5 The Buzz, or 93.3 The Mix, if you knows those things for your local area, that will pop up automatically.
Thomas Domville:
So you just open up Siri and say, play 101 The Fox, and all of a sudden that radio station comes up. So that’s been kind of a cool thing. So it’s one less thing to have to download. A lot of people are probably familiar with apps that have their own radio station, so you can kind of avoid those now, you don’t need that app around. So it helps you save some spots.
Josh Anderson:
Oh, definitely. And just being available by Siri really makes it a whole lot easier.
Thomas Domville:
Definitely. I really like that quite a bit. And then probably one of my other most favorite is, within Safari now, is that they have a lot of new features in here. Now it has a pretty good set of things you can do in the previous version, but this version just puts things in a whole new dynamic of how to look at webpages. And so you can now have presets for each website globally or per site.
Thomas Domville:
So you can have these presets that if you’re low vision, you can have certain zoom level to be on this percent at this webpage, or I like to use apparator which means that it takes out a lot of the navigational nonsense that you tend to kind of swipe, swipe, swipe through. You can have that default on. And there’s just so many things within Safari, the download manager is also my favorite which means I can download things and save it to my iCloud. So if there’s a file that I need or an executable, I can now download it, put it in my iCloud, and it works just all from your phone so I don’t have to use my computer as often as I want to.
Josh Anderson:
Oh, that does make it a lot better. And I know there’s some other apps that kind of had some changes. Files, I think, in the app store. What are some of the changes that came to them?
Thomas Domville:
Files now you are able to compress things, so if you have a zip file, you can uncompress that, and you can also zip things with it as well. Files also is great with other cloud stores such as Dropbox, One Drive, things like that. Since I’m an office 365 user, I use one drive pretty quite heavily because that comes with a one, I believe what is that, one gig worth of a, or actually one terabyte of-
Josh Anderson:
I think so, yeah.
Thomas Domville:
Flash storage. So there’s a lot of new features within Files such as the zip and unzip. You can now share folders within your iCloud now, which was kind of a lacking deal, that’s why I used Dropbox so much for that reason. I like to share a lot of folders and now within Files and iCloud, you’re able to share folders with people, and that makes it much easier. So if you’re a iCloud user with the loss of space, you want to share things, that is an extra bonus for you there.
Josh Anderson:
Thomas, I got to ask you, we’re going to look into the future here a little bit, iOS 14s probably a year, maybe longer, away. What haven’t you seen yet that you’ve wanted to see that you hope to see with the next big update?
Thomas Domville:
Well that’s a great question. You know, honestly, when this new voiceover activity came out there this year, it gave me an idea how we can incorporate that even better. And so I mentioned before, let’s just say I open up Safari. Wouldn’t it be awesome if there’s a predefined voiceover activity that includes gestures. So what I’m saying is that to incorporate the voiceover customization of gestures, along with voiceover activity. So Web is a great example for all of us, whether we use a Mac or, a lot of us use JAWS for example. Wouldn’t it be great if we were able to just two finger swipe up, go to headings, a one finger swipe left to go to links, whatever. You can just customize any way you want that you couldn’t do because we’re limited in [inaudible 00:23:56] positions we have as a global. So right now voiceover gesture is set globally, but wouldn’t it be cool if we can implement voiceover gestures per app?
Thomas Domville:
So Safari would have it’s own set of gestures that we come to love that makes things easier to surf through the web. That could be the same way for mail. Let’s just say I want to do a three finger swipe up to reply, three finger swiped down to reply to all. I would love to see that. That is probably my biggest one that I will love to see come up. But there are so many other little things I suppose, but that’s probably the biggest one I wish they would do in the future.
Josh Anderson:
Well Thomas, we can’t thank you enough for being on the show today. Tell our folks how they can get involved with AppleVis or find out more about it.
Thomas Domville:
Oh sure, absolutely. You just go to your favorite web browser of choice and you just type in AppleVis.com, A-P-P-L-E-V as in Victor, I-S.com. And from there you can actually sign up for a account, it’s very accessible to sign up for an account, it’s not required, but if you like to interact, ask questions, or answer people, or share your apps or thoughts and things like that, we welcome it. You just create an account, but if you don’t want to, you just come AppleVis.com, kind of peruse through the site. There is so much in there. You’re going to spend many, many days a month just trying to find all the ins and outs of AppleVis, there’s so much to it.
Thomas Domville:
We do have a Twitter that you can follow, its @AppleVis, is AppleVis is one word. You can follow that on Twitter. We post a lot of things on Twitter, that’s our mainstream when it comes to social media. We do have a Facebook page, we don’t really touch that all that much, we don’t find a lot of people use that as much as Twitter. So those are the things you can find AppleVis, and of course, AppleVis podcasts you can find pretty much anywhere that you have a podcast, app or computer, just search for AppleVis.
Josh Anderson:
And I’m not real sure, but I’ve looked up AppleVis podcasts before, and I swear they have one that comes out every single day. So I don’t know if that’s all the time, or just when new operating systems come out, but I know you guys do put out a ton of contents.
Josh Anderson:
We barely scratch the surface of all the different things with iOS 13. But again, Thomas, I can’t thank you enough for coming on and telling our listeners about just some of the really great features that have come out with this new update.
Thomas Domville:
Thank you for having me on.
Josh Anderson:
Do you have a question about assistive technology? Do you have a suggestion for someone we should interview on Assistive Technology Update? If you do, call our listener line at (317) 721-7124. Shoot us a note on Twitter @INDATAProject, or check us out on Facebook. Are you looking for a transcript or show notes? Head on over to our website at www.Eastersealstech.com. Assistive Technology Update is a proud member of the accessibility channel. For more shows like this, plus so much more, head over to accessibilitychannel.com. The views expressed by our guests are not necessarily that of this host or the INDATA project.
Josh Anderson:
This has been your Assistive Technology Update, I’m Josh Anderson with the INDATA project at Easterseals Crossroads in Indianapolis, Indiana. Thank you so much for listening, and we’ll see you next time.