Turning On/Off Voiceover
iFocus@Hadley
Turning On/Off Voiceover
Presented by
Douglas Walker
November 11, 2016
Douglas Walker
Hello, my name is Douglas Walker. Today we are going
to be taking a look at a couple of really simple ways that
we have for quickly turning on and off Voiceover, and we’ll
be using our iPhone for today’s demonstration but no
worries there because these same gestures are going to
work whether we’re using our iPhone, our iPad or even
our iPod Touch. Now for those of you that might not
know, Voiceover is Apple’s screen-reading software, and a
screen reader gives a person with a visual impairment the
ability to totally use their device, and it does this by
speaking the items or any information that happens to be
on our screen and so that’s pretty fantastic.
All right, we aren’t going to be covering today how to
totally set up a new iDevice. However, it’s good to know
that when we first turn on our new iDevice, we can easily
turn on Voiceover by just triple-clicking our Home button,
and of course our Home button is the round button and it’s
located right down here in the center of our screen, and
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Turning On/Off Voiceover
we would just simply tap or quickly press our Home button
three times. Now as we said, we’re not going to go into
exactly how to set up a new device today. However, if
we’re wanting to set up a new device, we really are going
to need to know some basic Voiceover gestures, and
these are the gestures that we’re going to use for
navigating our screen.
All right, so if you don’t yet know these gestures, well, it is
your lucky day because we just so happen to have a
couple of iFocus videos that just might come in handy. I
tell you, you’re really going to want to check out our
Beginning Voiceover Gestures iFocus video and our
Advanced Voiceover Gestures iFocus video because
these two iFocus videos will really help to get us quickly
up and running on our device.
Okay, so like we said, today is all about taking a look at a
couple of really easy ways of turning on and off Voiceover,
and now one of the easiest ways to turn on and off
Voiceover is by using Siri. Now if we’re not yet familiar
with Siri, well, Apple likes to call Siri our iPhone’s personal
assistant and with Siri, we’re able to do things like set
reminders or set calendar events. We’re able to perform a
web search if we like. We can place a phone call or even
send a text message, and today of course we will be using
Siri to turn on and off Voiceover.
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Turning On/Off Voiceover
Now Siri really is super easy to use. All we have to do to
activate Siri is to just hold down our Home button and
again, our Home button is the small, round button down
here at the center of our screen, so how about we take a
look at exactly how all this works. Okay, so we have our
iPhone right here in front of us and like we said, our Home
button is right down here in the bottom center of our
screen, so all we need to do to activate Siri is to just hold
down this Home button and then of course we can just say
turn on Voiceover. Now once we finish saying turn on
Voiceover, we’ll just lift our finger off our Home button and
Siri is going to announce okay, I’ve turned on Voiceover. I
tell you, it really is as easy as that, so how about we go
ahead and give it a try.
Okay, so we’ll just hold down our Home button here, and
we’ll just hold down our Home button. Okay, and there
you go. We have activated or turned on Voiceover. Okay,
so our Siri screen now is going to be visible to us, and this
is going to list our whole Siri conversation that we just had
so we’ll just need to tap our Home button to close this Siri
conversation and quickly get back to our desktop, so how
about we just tap our Home button here so we’ll just tap
our Home button. Okay, so here we are back on our
Desktop, and we actually heard Voiceover announce that
our focus is currently on our Notes app here and so that is
pretty great.
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Turning On/Off Voiceover
Now let’s say that we want to use Siri to turn off Voiceover
as well. Well, we will use exactly the same procedure.
We would just hold down our Home button again. Only
now that we have Voiceover turned on, we’ll actually hear
two tones. Now we’ll continue to hold down our Home
button of course, and then we’ll simply just say turn off
Voiceover and now we’ll actually hear Voiceover
announce Voiceover off, and we’ll also hear Siri say okay,
I’ve turned off Voiceover and Voiceover will be turned off
and it really is just as easy as that.
Now our Siri conversation of course is going to be visible
again on the screen here, so we’ll just need to tap our
Home button to again return to our desktop. Now we’re
not going to turn off Voiceover right now because we’re
going to take a look at another really easy way of turning
on and off Voiceover, and this is by using our accessibility
shortcut. Now some people also refer to this as our Tripleclick Home feature, and this can be really useful,
especially if we are maybe sharing our device with
someone that doesn’t need to use Voiceover. That way
we can easily turn off Voiceover when we don’t need to
use it.
Now our accessibility shortcut is currently turned off.
However, if it were turned on, all we would need to do to
toggle Voiceover on and off is just tap our Home button
three times and I tell you, this can be super handy, so let’s
take a quick look at how to set up our accessibility shortcut
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then. Now our accessibility shortcut setting is under our
accessibility settings within our Settings app, and of
course our Settings app is right here on our Desktop so
how about we just touch our Settings app here and we’ll
head into that, so we’ll go ahead and just touch our
settings here. Okay, so here it is so we’ll just single-finger
double-tap to activate our settings here, and we’ll just
single-finger double-tap anywhere on our screen. Great.
Our Settings app has opened and we’ve been placed on
our Settings heading here in the top center of our screen,
and of course it’s just below the time in our status bar
here.
Now our accessibility settings are actually within our
general settings, so we will just need to right-flick to our
General button here and so we’ll go ahead and just rightflick from here and we’ll right-flick. Okay, and there’s our
search field and we’ll quickly just start right-flicking here
and every time I right-flick, you hear a click there. There’s
cellular. I’m right-flicking. Okay, and here’s our General
button for us, so we’ll just go ahead and single-finger
double-tap here and open our General settings here so
we’ll just single-finger double-tap. Okay, our General
settings have opened and we’ve actually been placed on
our Back button in the top left corner of our screen.
Remember we’re headed to our accessibility settings here,
so we’ll go ahead and just right-flick until we find our
Accessibility button here and so we’ll just right-flick. That’s
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our General heading, and we’ll keep right-flicking and I’m
right-flicking again, right-flicking. All right, and here of
course is our Accessibility button, so we will just singlefinger double-tap here to open up our Accessibility settings
so we’ll just single-finger double-tap. Okay, and we’re
getting there. Our Accessibility settings of course have all
opened for us, and we’ve been placed once again on our
Back button in the top left corner here.
Okay, so our Accessibility Shortcut button is actually the
very last item in our accessibility list here. Now we could
just keep right-flicking through all of our accessibility list
here. However, a really great gesture for quickly moving
through a long list like this one is our three-finger flick-up
gesture, but we actually first need to be within our list
before we can actually use it here so how about we go
ahead and right-flick to the first item in our list here, so
we’ll just go ahead and right-flick to our first item here.
Okay, this is not an item in our list. This is our heading
here so we’ll right-flick again. There’s our Vision heading.
I’ll flick one more time.
Okay, here is our Voiceover button and it’s of course at
the top of our list, and we actually heard Voiceover
announce that it is currently turned on. Now we could
single-finger double-tap here to open all of our Voiceover
settings if we like, and we could actually toggle Voiceover
off right here. However, it would really be a pain to have
to go through all of these settings each time that we want
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to turn Voiceover on and off, so it’s really great that we
have the ability to set our accessibility shortcut so let’s go
ahead and just use our three-finger flick-up gesture a few
times to quickly move through our accessibility list here, so
we’re going to go ahead and move to our Accessibility
Shortcut button so we’ll just three-finger flick-up a few
times here so we’ll flick up.
Okay, so there’s 30 items here. I’ll flick up with three
fingers again. We’re almost there so I’ll flick up with three
fingers again until we get to the bottom of our list here.
Okay, 24 to 30 of 30 here so here we are at the end of our
list and like we said, our Accessibility Shortcut button is
actually the last item in our list here, so how about we just
touch near the bottom of our screen here to find it so we’ll
just touch here.
Okay, and here is our Accessibility Shortcut button and we
heard that it’s turned off, so let’s go ahead and just singlefinger double-tap to open it here and we’ll just single-finger
double-tap. All right, finally we’re here and once again of
course, we have been placed on our Back button in the
top left corner of our screen here. Now what we have
here is a list of items in which we can choose to be
toggled on and off when we triple-click our Home button,
and of course Voiceover is one of the items in our list here
so how about we just right-flick until we find Voiceover
here so we just right-flick here, and there’s our heading of
course so we’ll right-flick again and we’re there.
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We’re told this is our heading. We’re told that we can
triple-click the Home button, and we’ll right-click flick and
there we are so Voiceover is actually the first item in our
list here, and now it’s not selected but if you want to select
it, well, you guessed it. All we have to do is just perform a
single-finger double-tap, so how about we do just that.
We’ll single-finger double-tap to select Voiceover as our
Triple-click Home option here, and we’ll just double-tap
here. All right, we heard Voiceover announce that
Voiceover is now selected.
Now we could continue to right-flick through our list here
and choose other items that could serve as our
Accessibility Shortcut, and we have things here like our
Magnifier, Invert Colors or Grayscale. We could select
zoom or switch control from this list or even assistive
touch. However, today is all about Voiceover so now that
we have Voiceover selected in our list here, why don’t we
give it a try but first let’s go ahead and head back to our
Desktop, so we’ll just quickly tap our Home button here so
we’ll just tap our Home button or press it one time to get
back to our Desktop.
Okay, so we’re back on our Desktop so let’s go ahead,
and try out our Accessibility Shortcut setting now that we
have it turned on. All we’ll need to do is just triple-click our
Home button here, and we should be able to quickly turn
off Voiceover so let’s just tap or press this Home button
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three times quickly and we’ll just tap. All right, and there
we go. Voiceover of course is back on as we heard and
hey, we’re good to go. Whether we like to use Siri or our
Accessibility Shortcut, it really is nice to know that we have
the option of a couple of really simple methods for quickly
turning Voiceover on and off. 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 at Hadley page on the Hadley Institute for the Blind
and Visually Impaired website at www.hadley.edu.
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