January 09, 2018

Reach out and Touch the new Braille Features in iOS 11

24 minutes

IN this podcast, Scott Davert demonstrates and discusses the changes for braille display users in iOS 11 and later. How to set up type to Siri, braille captioning, how to customize braille keyboard commands, and the new settings in the braille menu are covered. A roughly edited transcript follows. Please note, This transcript was created soely for communication access. It is not a certified legal

transcript and may not be entirely verbatim.

Unknown Speaker: Welcome to Applevis.

Scott Davert: Hey, everybody, it is Scott Davert back with an Applevis podcast. This podcast is on what's new for braille users from iOS 11 onward. I'm a little late recording this podcast for a few reasons: one of them being that life has just kind of gotten in the way, and the other being that I wanted to wait for some of these bugs to get worked out which were really well-documented on the Applevis website, but they kind of made it clunky to record a podcast. There are a few little bugs remaining that I'll talk about, but it's gotten a lot better than the first release of 11.0 for sure back in September.

For this demonstration, I'm using my iPhone 8 with iOS 11.2.1, and of course VoiceOver. The first few things I'll talk about here are just a few things that aren't really easy to demonstrate, but they might be important updates for you depending on your situation.

If you have a Focus fifth generation, iOS 11 brings support for that device. Whether you have the Focus 40, or the brand-new 14 that came out about a month ago, you will now have access with iOS 11, and later. So, for those of you who have those devices, you can be happy, and you probably already are happy, using your Focus display with your iOS device.

Another minor, but important update is the fact that emoticons are now accessible with braille displays. Speech users have been enjoying them for quite a while, and knowing all those smiling piles of poo that their young kids, or nephews, or whatever it is might send them, but as braille users they just showed up as a few symbols, and there was really no way to differentiate between one emoticon and another. That has been fixed in iOS 11.0.

Now, I'm gonna go ahead and get into the demonstration part of this podcast. The first thing I'm going to do is take you through how to set up captions, and talk a little bit about that. And we're gonna go ahead and go through the braille menu, and talk about those changes. Then I'll show you how to set up new commands, or assign commands functions, however you wanna look at that, and finally we'll wrap up.

So, I'm going to go ahead, and go directly to the VoiceOver menu. On my particular setup here, I am going to use a Backspace, Space with V. That is a command that I programmed in to take me directly to the VoiceOver menu.

VoiceOver: Settings, Accessibility, Back button.

Scott: So, to set up captioning for braille displays, or speech users, and this also applies to subtitles, I need to find verbosity, so I'll hit Space with F.

VO: Enter search text.

Scott: V-E-R-B, enter.

VO: Verbosity button.

Scott: There we go, verbosity. It went right to it. Sometimes that works, and sometimes it doesn't. I'll go ahead and activate the verbosity settings.

VO: Selected, VoiceOver, Back button.

Scott: I'm not going to go through the rest…

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