Imagine slapping your nightstand to snooze your iPhone’s alarm. Or rapping on the kitchen countertop to flip recipe book pages so your flour-coated hands don’t mess up the iPad’s screen. These scenarios could soon be real: XTouch is a new technology that essentially turns any solid surface into an input device for an iPad or iPhone.
iOS 7 changed the visual palette on our favorite Apple mobile devices, and it may not be to everyone’s liking.
If you want to tone it down a bit, consider darkening the colors up, and reducing the white point on your iPad, iPhone or iPod touch to make things just a little bit less intense.
iOS 7 came with a new look and feel, including the font used across the system. It’s a little thinner than earlier versions of iOS, so it might be a bit tricky to read, especially on the small iPhone screen.
You can always increase the size of text dynamically, but if you just need a little boost to the readability, try enabling Bold Text.
Fact: I’m currently waiting for my lazy optician to supply my first pair of “old-man glasses” aka specs with progressive lenses. In young-folk terms that means I get glasses which let me read without holding the iPad at arms-length.
In the meantime, I have boosted the size of my iPad’s text, but on the Mac I might give Zoom It a spin. It’s a loupe app that magnifies whatever is under it’s little virtual glass eye, and it’s now compatible with Mavericks.
My ten year old son has gotten significantly into Civilization V lately, and we bought him his own copy on sale at Steam yesterday. So, he was at his mom’s house, and I was at my house, and he wanted me to invite him to a private match.
In order to do so, I had to enable Assistive Devices, just like Steam has always asked players to do to help enable the overlays and multiplayer invite system. So I headed to the System Preferences, to the Accessibility preference pane, like always. Alas, there is no place there to click the familiar “Enable access for assistive devices” button. I looked high, I looked low. No dice. No enabling access for assistive devices, either.
So then I turned to Google.
New accessibility options about in iOS 7 beta, helping folks of all abilities access and use their iOS devices more effectively and efficiently. The Physical & Motor section of the accessibility options now allow folks with motor and other physical disabilities to use a switch for visual and auditory scanning options, emulate various gestures with assistive touch (introduced in iOS 6), adjust the Home click speed, and, as the headline above notes, set where the incoming calls are sent.
Want to have your incoming calls go automatically to a headset or speaker? It’s relatively easy in iOS 7 beta.
While the style of iOS has been described as flatter, that’s typically more true of the icon design and some of the panel and font combinations than the entire operating system.
In fact, there’s a subtle parallax effect that can be seen pretty easily behind the home page icons. I use the space and stars wallpaper, and when I tilt or twist my iPhone 5 running iOS 7, I can definitely see things almost move, or change perspective.
It’s a slick visual feature, but if it drives you nuts, or you feel icky with it in the background there, here’s how to disable it.
Ever wish that you could change the font size in your iPad web browser? Well, with NaviDys you totally can. You can also switch up the font, and adjust letter spacing and line spacing. What is this browser? A type nerd’s dream? Well, maybe, but really it’s designed to make things easier for the visually impaired.
Amazon’s Kindle app for iOS hasn’t always been as accessible as Apple’s own iBooks, but that changed today with a new update that adds VoiceOver support, among other new accessibility features. Kindle will now read aloud over 1.8 million books, allowing those who are visually impaired to kick back and listen to their favorite titles.
Accessibility is a priority to the designers and engineers at Apple. They have built some amazing software right into each operating system, from OS X to iOS, all for no etra charge and no need to add extra programs on to be able to use the products if you have a visual, hearing, motor, or cognitive disability.
But if you don’t have a disability (yet–we’re all just a lucky step or two away), you can take advantage of these systems for yourself or other family members.
Here are five different ways to do just that.
Assisted Touch is an accessibility feature for iOS, usable on any iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch, that recreates the hardware buttons and other gestures that someone with a motor disability might need to use. It also lets other folks use the Home, volume, screen lock, wake/sleep, and multitasking bar without using any of the hardware buttons themselves.
This can be pretty handy if you have the device in a case or holder of some type where accessing the buttons is tricky or impossible, like a home-made picture frame, for example.
Here’s how to activate this useful feature.
Another accessibility option like VoiceOver and Zoom, originally created for those with visual impairments, is Speak Selection. There are times when you may not want to turn the entire VoiceOver system on, having Siri read every button and icon on the screen, but would prefer to just have your iOS device speak text you’ve highlighted on the screen.
As an added bonus for those with print or learning disabilities, you can have your iPhone or iPad highlight the words as it speaks them for true bi-modal output (seeing and hearing the words at the same time).
Here’s how to make this happen.
Another accessibility option built right into iOS is Zoom. Like VoiceOver, it was originally created to help those with a visual impairment access their iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. Zoom is made for those who need things magnified on the screen, and it can be pretty darn helpful for those of us who may not have a specific visual disability.
Some apps zoom in within the app itself, like Maps, Safari, or Google Earth. That doesn’t help if you need the buttons and iOS controls magnified, or the text in apps like Mail, right?
Here’s how to set things up with Zoom.
If you’ve read these tips for any length of time, you’ll know that there are plenty of settings on your iPhone that were designed first and foremost for people with various disabilities, but that can be extremely useful for those of us who don’t have a specific disability, as well.
Flash-powered alerts are one of these features; for those with hearing impairments, using the iPhone’s flash to let them know when a notification alert has happened is critical, as they may not be able to hear an audible alert, nor the telltale buzz sound the iPhone makes when set on a flat surface.
If you want to use this same notification feature yourself, perhaps when having an audible alert, vibration or otherwise, isn’t viable, here’s what to do.
You ever do that thing where you have to move your mouse around, jiggling the little thing just to find the dang cursor? I do it all the time these days, with my smaller screen Macbook Air and the Mac Mini that’s connected to the HDTV across the room from me, since there’s so much going on onscreen that I often lose track of it.
There’s an easy way to fix this problem, and it involves the Accessibility options that come built right in to your Mac OS X system.
If you were used to inverting the colors on your Mac with a Control-Command-Option-8, you might have noticed that this has changed in OS X Mountain Lion. The older keyboard shortcut doesn’t work any more, and has been replaced with the less simple Command-Option-F5 shortcut to bring up an Accessibility Options dialog box. You have to then manually click the checkbox next to Invert Display Colors.
Here’s how to get the old shortcut back, for a quick invert.
Just because you’re blind and can’t see what you’re taking pictures of does not mean you can’t use Instagram. Thanks to the Accessibility features in iOS, Tommy Edison is able to use an iPhone and take pictures through Instagram to give his followers a view of his world, even though he can’t see.
The process is mind blowing and seems incredibly tedious, but it’s awesome that even blind people can connect with people through Instagram. And you know what, Tommy’s photos aren’t all that bad compared to some of my friends’.
Source: Tommy Edison
Via: Kottke
Ever wanted to check your email in your car, or while cooking? Running? Eating? Now you can with Talkler, a new app from Talkler Labs LLC. Talkler is out now in the App Store, ready to get you checking and sending email without using your hands or even your eyes.
All you need to do once you’ve installed the app is say, “Hey Talkler,” and you’ll be able to listen to your email, and reply using your voice. You can navigate through all your email with your voice, as well.
Good news, everyone! Barnes & Noble’s Nook app for iOS has just been updated with support for Apple’s fantastic VoiceOVer accessibility feature, as well as the zoom functionality. This brings the Nook iOS app up to parity with iBooks, the only other iOS e-reader app that can be used by folks with a visual impairment or learning disability to have books read out loud.
Zoom lets those with low vision see the screen at much higher magnification than just increasing the font size, allowing them to use the buttons, icons, and other visual interface systems that they can’t see at the standard size on the iPad or iPhone screen.
The iPhone is a paragon of simple design. It packs a ton of complexity in a simple, easy to understand package. One example is the iconic Home button. One click of the iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad touch will wake your device, a click and hold will bring up Siri, and a triple click can enable a host of accessibility features.
Did you know, however, that you can set the speed at which the Home button will recognize your clicks? Added in iOS 6, this feature will be a boon to anyone with motor issue or even just those of us who want to slow down the speed at which we double or triple click that Home button.
Apple silently updated the iOS 6 App Store today, adding more accessibility features to its VoiceOver interface for users who experience blindness and low vision. The new changes are in response to user complaints about accessibility in the iOS 6 App Store, and will help those users perform faster searches when interacting with the App Store via the VoiceOver system.
Built into every Mac are a host of accessibility options. People with visual disabilities may need to zoom into the screen, making everything on it bigger in order to see enough to use the Mac. Individuals who experience blindness can use VoiceOver, which has the Mac speak everything on screen, including menus and dialog buttons. Other people with visual impairments may need to invert the Display colors and adjust the contrast to help them with eye fatigue as well as seeing the items on screen.
The BBC has updated its iOS today, finally delivering high-resolutions visuals for the third-generation iPad. It also introduces “improved video performance,” better accessibility with VoiceOver controls, and more.
With every iteration of iOS, Apple provides more and more accessibility features to its users to make iOS devices open to more people than ever before. iOS 6 includes something big. Guided Access is essentially a tool that allows you to restrict certain areas of your screen and physical buttons in order to make the device easier to use for someone with a disability, or for younger children.
Guided access can even be used in the classroom, to stop children from exiting the current app while taking a test. It’s a really neat feature, and in my opinion, one of the most overlooked. With iOS 6 beta 2, the feature is finally functional, so in this video I’ll show you how it can work.
Flipboard for iOS has received another major update this morning, introducing a number of new features like SoundCloud and Readability integration, a new category dedicated to audio feeds, Accessibility options for the visually impaired, and lots more.
