Using the Speak Screen Feature
iFocus@Hadley
Using the Speak Screen Feature
Presented by
Douglas Walker
March 14, 2016
Douglas Walker
Hello, my name is Douglas Walker. Today we are going
to be looking at using the Speak Screen feature, and we
will be using the iPad Air for today’s demonstration. There
are just so many accessibility features built right into our
Apple operating system, and the iFocus series has
primarily dealt with how to use the VoiceOver features.
However today’s video will focus on our Speak Screen
feature that is designed to be used for people with low
vision.
Now this Speech feature or Speak feature can really help
in the reduction of our eye fatigue. so if you find that you’re
having eye strain headaches by the end of the day
because you’ve read way too many emails or maybe a lot
of articles on your favorite news site, then this is the
accessibility feature for you because by using just one
simple gesture, our entire screen will be read to us and
that is pretty great. All right, we’ll first need to know where
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to go to turn on our Speak Screen feature, and then we’re
going to take a look at exactly how it all works.
All right, so I use Apple’s Zoom or Magnification feature
because most of what’s on our screen is just way too
small for me to see so as a person with a visual
impairment, you’ll see me using zoom as we progress
through today’s video. Okay, so we’ll find our Speak
Screen feature in our Settings menu and my settings is
right down here in my doc, so we’ll just touch our settings
to get started and we’ll touch. All right, great. We’ll need
to make sure that our General button on our left panel
over here is activated, and since it’s highlighted or is
turned blue over here, we know for sure that it has been
selected.
Okay, we’ll need to look again in our right panel here to
find our Accessibility button because our Speech settings
are under the general area here and under Accessibility,
and so let me zoom in here and here it is right in our list
here so we’ll just tap it to open our Accessibility [inaudible
0:02:41]. Now I’ll be zooming in and out so you guys can
see the entire screen, but I really do have to have it
zoomed in to be able to see it here so we just tap our
Accessibility settings here. Okay, we see that our
Accessibility features have opened here in our right panel
and our Speak Screen feature is under our Speech
settings, not under VoiceOver but under Speech, so we’ll
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just come down our list to find our Speech settings right
here and here they are, so we’ll just tap our Speech
settings here to open it so we’ll just tap.
All right, we have several different options on the right
panel here under our Speech settings, and these give us a
lot of control over having our device read to us and the
first item that we’ll see is our Speak Selection feature
here. Now this is a really great feature as well, and I think
we have this feature turned on so since we have it turned
on, we have the ability to have only the text that we’ve
highlighted or selected read to us, so this just might be a
feature that we’ll explore in another video. All right,
however the feature we’re looking for is right below this on
our screen and this of course is our Speak Screen feature.
Now just to the right on our screen, we have another
On/off switch for turning on this feature so we’ll just tap it
to turn it on. All right, our Speak Screen feature is now
turned on, and it’s running in the background and it’s
ready to be used at any time so we don’t have to come
here to turn it back off because it’s running now but before
we go and use it, let’s look at just a couple more of our
Speech settings on this screen. Now just below our
Speak selection, we’re given some directions that tell us
that we can swipe down with two fingers from the top of
the screen to hear the contents of the screen be read
here, and that’s exactly what we’re going to be doing with
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this and that’s great. We’ll try that in just a bit but first let’s
check out a couple more of our settings here.
All right, as we move down our screen, we see that we
have a Voices button here, so we’re really able to activate
this and go in and choose from a wide range of different
dialects and different voices to be read to us. Right now
we’re going to be using just our default Screen Reader
voice here so that’s really great. All right, now just below
this, we have an adjustable bar for controlling the speed of
our speech here, and if we slide it to the right towards the
rabbit over here, it’s going to speed our speech up and
you see the little rabbit over there, and if we slide it back to
the left or want to slow it back down, we just slide it back
over to the left towards the turtle over here.
All right, now we’ll see in just a bit where we can control
our speech’s speed kind on the fly or on the go as we’re
going, but it’s really nice to know that we have the ability to
control our default for our speech right here. Okay, so
let’s just look at one more heading on the screen or one
more item on our screen here, and this is the ability to
have our text highlighted as it is read to us which can be
really nice to let us know exactly where we are on our
screen so we don’t get lost on our screen. Now as we
see, this is another On/off switch and mine is currently
turned on right here.
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Okay, so now that we have our Speak Screen feature
turned on here, how about we take a look at just what a
great tool it can be. All right, so how about we head to our
iBooks app to see how this works, so we’ll just tap our
Home button here to close our settings and we’ll just tap it.
All right, and we’ll find our iBooks app is right here on our
desktop, so we’ll just tap our iBooks app to launch it.
Great. Now okay, we already have a book open here and
it is Winnie the Pooh. Yes, I spend many hours curled up
with my Winnie the Pooh book. All right, just for
demonstration purposes, right?
Anyway, this looks like a perfect time for us to use or
demonstrate our Speak Screen feature. Okay, earlier we
were given the directions for how to activate our Speak
Screen feature. We were told that we could just swipe
down the screen with two fingers and that’s going to get it
reading. Okay, now a good tip is that we need to have just
a little space between our fingers here before we actually
swipe down our screen. Otherwise if we have our fingers
together, our device will just see our fingers as one big
finger and we don’t want that, so how about we try it and
we’ll just swipe down with two fingers, swipe down the
screen using two fingers like this, and we should have our
screen start reading to us here so we’ll just swipe down
with two fingers.
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All right, great and as we can see, we’ve had a Dialogue
box up here, and I tapped the Pause button so that we can
discuss it. Now this Dialogue box will keep trying to
minimize itself, so we’ll just have to keep tapping it if we
want to keep it visible. However it’s kind of nice that it
really does minimize itself so that we have the ability to
see our entire screen. Okay, we can even move this little
icon or this little Dialogue box around if we would like to
have it maybe in a different location here.
Now to move it, we just tap and hold on it, and then we
just drag it to a new location here so let’s see how that
works. We’ll just tap and hold on it so we’ll just tap, and
then we can just drag it wherever we want it and then
when I let it go, of course I’m going to put it back down
here where it was, it kind of slides over to the side so it’s
out of the way. All right, and that’s cool, right? Okay, so
let’s just tap it to maximize it again and we’ll check things
out on it here.
Okay, so just inside of the left and right and I’ll keep
having to tap it here remember because it’s going to want
to collapse, but just here we see another one of these
rabbits to the right and our turtle here to the left. Those
are buttons that’s going to slow down and speed up our
speech as it’s speaking here, and we’ll keep tapping here
and just to the inside of these buttons, we have buttons
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that will allow us to fast-forward or to rewind our speech
here.
Now we also have a Cancel button that looks like an X
over here in the far right of our Dialogue box and as you
probably guessed, activating that is going to cancel our
speech and close our Dialogue box and okay, last but not
least, we have our Play/pause button in the center right
here, and of course tapping that will get our speech
reading again, so how about we touch it again and get it
reading because there’s something really cool because I
want it to play to the end of this page here for us so we’ll
let it play this page. It was [inaudible 0:10:40].
Okay, and we can see it highlighting as it reads down the
screen which is really cool, and now you saw one of my
favorite things. It was closer to the end of the page there.
It made it jump there, but one of my favorite things about
our Speak Screen feature is the fact that it will turn the
page and continue reading for us once it reaches the end
of our page and that is really a nice feature for us. Okay,
so I think that you can see what a great tool our Speak
Screen feature can be for us here to help us really reduce
our eye fatigue throughout the day.
Now we’re able to use this feature in so many different
places. As you just saw, we’re able to have our iBooks
read aloud of course. However we can also use our
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Speak Screen feature to read articles while we’re
browsing the web. We could use it to read our notes or
any documents that we might have written, and we can
even use it read our emails and so that’s pretty great. All
right, again, it’s not really hard to see how our Speak
Screen feature can be a really, really great tool for us, and
it’s something that I use just about every day. Again, my
name is Douglas Walker. Take care and I’ll see you next
time.
For more from the iFocus Series, including many other
topics of interest to individuals with vision loss, visit the
Videos@Hadley page on the Hadley Institute for the Blind
and Visually Impaired website at www.hadley.edu.
[End of Audio– 0:12:32]
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