Using the Magnifier
iFocus@Hadley
Using the Magnifier
Presented by
Douglas Walker
November 28, 2016
Douglas Walker
The Hadley Institute for the Blind and Visually Impaired
presents Eye Focus. Tips on using the vision accessibility
features in iOS. In today's installment we'll look at using
the magnifier.
Hello, my name is Douglas Walker. Today we'll be looking
at how to use our built in magnifier and we'll be using our
iPhone for today's demonstration. But no worries, our
magnifier will be available to us whether we're using our
iPhone, our iPad, or even our iPad Touch.
It really is fantastic that we have a built in magnifier that
uses our device's back facing camera to view images that
we can then enlarge on our device's screen. Now, this is a
feature that I tell you, I really do use all the time. And I use
it for everything from checking the temperature on my
thermostat, to reading price tags. Even things like reeding
the items on a menu at a restaurant. I tell you, I really do
use my built in magnifier for just about everything.
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Using the Magnifier
So, before we can actually use our magnifier, we will need
to first turn our magnifier feature on. To turn on our
magnifier, we'll need to activate our settings menu. Our
settings menu is right here on our desktop. We'll go ahead
and tap our settings app here. Alright, our settings menu
has opened for us here. Our magnifier settings can be
found under our accessibility settings which is under our
general button on our main list here. Let's go ahead and
scroll down our settings list here until we find our general
button.
We'll go ahead and scroll up our list here. Alright so here's
our general button here. Tap our general button to open it
up. Alright. Remember we're headed to our accessibility
settings. We'll go ahead and just scroll down our list until
we fin it. Alright, here's our accessibility button here. As we
said, the magnifier settings are located here. We'll go
ahead and tap our accessibility button here. Great. Here
we are. Our accessibility settings are now open for us.
We're right where we want to be because we'll find our
magnifier button just below our zoom button here.
As we can see, our magnifier is currently turned off. We
just need to activate our magnifier button and turn it on
we'll just tap our magnifier button here. Great. Our
magnifier settings are open for us. And we can simply tap
our magnifier toggle switch here to the right to turn on our
magnifier. Took a couple times for me to visually see that.
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Using the Magnifier
As we see, we have now turned on our magnifier feature.
We do have one more setting here that we need to check
out. This is our auto brightness button. Our toggle switch
here. Just below our auto brightness toggle switch, we're
given a descriptor for this toggle switch and we're told that
our auto brightness feature here will adjust our brightness
and our contrast based on our ambient light settings. Our
auto brightness is already turned on for us. However, if it
weren't turned on, we could just tap our toggle switch here
to turn it on.
Now that we turned on our magnifier how about we check
out how exactly to use it. We have quick access to our
magnifier at any time by simply triple tapping our home
button. Of course our home button is located at the bottom
center of our home screen. How about we just launch our
magnifier? Before we activate launch our magnifier, place
our iPhone on a stand. And this will give us the ability to
use our back facing camera here. Let's place our iPhone
on our stand here. Okay. Through the magic of video, our
iPhone is now on our stand. There are several iPhone
stands on the market, however this is the one I find myself
using all the time.
I use this stand mainly with my canopy reader app. Okay.
Are we ready for this? Our iPhone stand here is activate
called foppydue or foppydoe. That's kind of an interesting
name, but I'm told that it stands for photo copy document
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stand. Anyway, it really is super portable and it folds down
completely flat and fits great in my backpack when I travel.
The thing I like most is the price. The foppydoe stand
activate just costs 12 dollars and you really can't beat that.
You can find this stand by going to www.fopydo.com
Alright so now that we have our iPhone on our stand. We'll
go ahead now and triple tap our home button to launch our
magnifier. Okay. Our magnifier has opened for us. We've
been placed right in our magnification view screen. Now,
as we can see our back facing camera is now on. We're
seeing an enlarged view of the surface of our table our
background here. This is exactly what we're wanting. For
the purpose of today's demonstration, how about we just
magnify my business card here. I just so happen to have
one here.
We'll go ahead and place it under our device here. We see
that our business card has been enlarged and our
magnification view area here. Just below this
magnification view area, we have our zoom level
adjustable bar here. We can easily change our zoom level
by touching and dragging our adjustable bar to the right to
increase our magnification or we can simply drag to the
left to decrease our magnification here. That's pretty great.
Let's check out exactly how this works. We'll just drag our
zoom adjustable bar here to the right and left to check it
out.
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Using the Magnifier
Okay we're magnifying up and zooming in on our business
card. As we push to the left of course we're zooming back
out. This is easy as that. Zoom in and out on our business
card. We really have a lot of control of our magnification
level here. However, it might not be that easy for some of
us to be able to see our adjustable abr here. Apple has
given us another really easy way for changing our
magnification level. This is by using our pinch gesture in
our magnification view area here. If we simply pinch our
fingers out we'll increase of course our magnification level
and if we pinch in with our fingers, we'll decrease our
magnifier level.
Let's try that out. We'll pinch out a little and pinch in. We'll
zoom in. We're bouncing a little here on our stand.
Anyway, that's about as stable as we can make it. You see
it pinching in and out changes our zoom level there. Of
course I found that if I push my finger up the screen and
one finger down the screen that also increases or
decreases the magnifier level. That's super easy for us.
We have some other really great tools just below our
zoom adjustable bar here.
There might be times when we're in a dimly lit environment
and we just don't have enough light to view what is in our
magnifier view area here. Right here in the bottom left
corner of our screen, we have been given our flashlight
button. It's important to know if we're using our iPad, that
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Using the Magnifier
we won't have a flashlight button here because of course
our iPad doesn't have a flash on it and we're gonna see
our focus button in the bottom left corner of our iPad
screen down here instead of our flashlight button. Its good
to know that this is gonna be the only difference between
our iPhone and iPad's magnifier features.
If we just tap our magnifier flashlight button here. Our LED
lights for our camera will turn on. Those are gonna serve
as our flashlights. Let's give that a try we'll just tap our
flashlight button here. Great. This gives us a lot of light
here. However, this could be really great maybe if we're in
a dimly lit store or if we're in a restaurant. Anyway, that's
pretty great. We really don't need our flashlight right now,
we're gonna go turn it off. We'll touch our flashlight button
to turn it off. Alright. It's off. Just to the right of our
flashlight button here, we have our focus lock button or
remember if we're using our iPad this button is gonna be
on the bottom left corner of the screen.
Focus lock can be a really handy feature if we're wanting
our focus to remain locked on an image. Not change our
magnifier is something enters our magnifier view area
here. An example of this might be maybe if we're filling out
a form and we want our focus to remain on the form that
we're filling out here and not try to focus on a pencil or
hand and pen instead. Let's take a look at how this works.
We'll first turn on our auto focus lock button here. We're
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gonna lock our focus. We'll turn it on by touching here. As
we can see, our focus is now locked on our business card
here. Now if we place our hand under our camera here,
and there you go. Our camera is not gonna attempt to
focus on our hand but the focus is gonna remain on our
business card instead. We can see how this might be a
huge help if we're gonna fill out a form or maybe if we're in
a restaurant and we're writing in a tip on the receipt.
This lock feature really is a handy feature for those
reasons. To unlock our focus here of course all we need to
do is just touch our lock focus button again. Our focus is
now unlocked and our camera will now attempt to auto
focus when we move our device around. Our focus lock
button might be hard, and it is for me, for some of us to
see. Apple has given us another way, which is really great
to quickly turn our focus lock on and off. We can easily tap
once and our magnifier view area to turn it on and then to
turn it back off, we just tap our focus lock area twice again,
which is really cool. Let's try that. We'll go ahead and tap
once on our magnifier view area.
We can see that our focus lock button is now turned on.
That's really easy right? Now we can tap twice to turn it off
then. We'll tap twice on our magnifier view area here. And
it is as easy as that. Our focus lock has now turned off and
we're good to go. That's pretty great. We have a really big
button, an important button on the bottom center of our
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screen and this is activate our freeze frame button. Our
freeze frame button activate freezes or captures our image
here. Of course this is the object we happened to be
viewing at the time.
Once we capture our image, we can then zoom in or out
on it or we can save our captured image to our camera
roll. How about we check out how this works. We have our
business card here on our screen. Let's say want to
capture or save an image of it. I don't know why I didn't
want it save an image of my business card. Hey, I use this
feature all the time for capturing images of price tags or
even receipts I might need to submit to work. We'll go
ahead and capture our business card today. We'll just
touch or tap our freeze frame to do it. Great. We have now
captured our image and we noticed that our tools
disappeared because our captured image had expanded
now to cover our entire screen. No worries, we can easily
bring back our magnifier tools by just tapping anywhere on
our screen one time.
Now that our image has been captured, we can use our
pinch gesture again to zoom in or zoom out on our image
if we like. We'll just pinch in and we can see zooming in
and out here. Alright. And how cool is that, right? We also
mentioned that we have the ability to save our captured
image if we like. It's important to know that our image will
be saved to our photo library. It's really convenient for us.
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Using the Magnifier
Let's check out how to save our image. To save our
captured image, all we need to do is just tap or touch and
just hold our finger, we don't lift our finger, we hold our
finger on our screen. Then we're gonna see a save image
dialogue appear on our screen and then we can just tap
our save image dialogue to save our image to our camera
roll.
Let's go ahead and give that a try. We'll go ahead and tap
and hold. Our save image dialog has appeared for us
here. I just lifted my finger since that appeared. Then we
just simply tap our save image dialog to save our image to
our photo library. Let's go ahead and save our image. Go
ahead and tap our save image dialog. Our save image
dialog of course has disappeared and our image has been
saved to our photo library. Just great.
We mentioned earlier that we can make our magnifier
tools appear again by tapping anywhere on the screen.
We'll go ahead and tap our screen once. There you go.
Our magnifier tools are now visible again on the bottom of
our screen down here. Our captured image is still visible to
us on our screen here. We can tap our freeze frame
button again here to unfreeze our image. Of course we'll
just return back to our magnifier screen. We'll just tap our
freeze frame button again. Alright, that is great. Our
captured image has cleared. And we're back on our
magnifier view. We do have one more button or tool on
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Using the Magnifier
our screen here. This is a filters button. And I tell you, our
filters button is right here on the bottom right hand corner
of our screen.
Our filters button can give us so much control over how
the image in our magnifier view area activate appears.
The fact that we've been given options for choosing
between different filters means that we'll be able to
customize our magnifier view area so it works great for our
own visual impairment which is really beyond great for us.
When we turn on or activate our filters button, we're gonna
be given a totally new interface with a whole new set of
tools in which we're able to interact here. Let's go ahead
and check out our filters feature.
We'll just tap our filters button down here at the bottom
right hand corner of our screen. Alright, our filters screen
is now open. We have a whole new set of filter tools that
are available to us down here at the bottom of our screen.
Now, the top of our screen still looks very much like our
magnifier view area. However, we'll notice that we have
the word "none" just below our magnifier area here. This
means that no filters are currently applied to our filters
here. No filters are currently applied. If we want to change
between our different filters, all we need to do is just
perform a left or a right flick to move between all of them.
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Using the Magnifier
How about we check out how all this works by activate
doing it? Since we're on our first option of our first filter
here, how about we just left flick through the rest of our
filters. Alright, here's our white, our blue filter here. I'll flick
again and heres our yellow, we'll flick to the left again, cool
here's our gray scale filter for us. We'll flick to the left
again, here's our yellow and black filter. I this is our last
one, here's our yellow and black one coming up here.
Yeah, that's kind of a mess.
Alright, it's pretty easy to see what a wonderful feature we
have here with our filters. Let's quickly right flick back to
our normal view, or our none filter view. Flick back to
none. There you go. I tell you, our filters are pretty great. I
use this all the time. We have a couple adjustable bars
just below our viewing area here. However, before we
discuss these adjustable bars here, let's take a quick look
at our reverse image filter button. This invert or reverse
button here is down here at the bottom left corner of our
filter screen and our invert filters button gives us even
more control over creating just the perfect filter for us. It
does this my inverting or reversing any of the filters we just
saw here. How about we go ahead and activate this invert
or reverse filters button here. And we'll check out how this
works too. We'll just tap here at the bottom left corner.
Alright, remember we were on our none or normal filter
here. Now, our none view has been inverted for us which
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is really great. Now if we just left flick through our filters,
we'll see that each one of our filters has been inverted or
reversed. Let's go and left flick through these. We see how
each one of these filters gives us a totally different look for
use here. Alright, pretty cool, huh? And that's our last red
black filter. Of course that's our last filter. It really is easy
to see that our invert filters button gives us even that much
more control over how we use this.
How about we turn off our invert or reverse image button.
So, we'll just tap here to do that. Our invert filters is now
off and we just right flick back to our none filter here.
Great. There we are. Here we are of course on our none
view or our view with no filter and that's pretty great. We
mentioned earlier that we do have a couple of adjustable
bars here. And the first of our adjustable bars is our
brightness control. You probably already guess that if we
slide our adjustable bar to the right, our brightness bar to
the right, our image will become brighter and we can
darken our image by sliding it to the left. How about we
see that in action? We'll go ahead and adjust our
brightness.
Yeah it's a lot brighter if we slide to the left and a lot darker
if we slide to the right. A lot of control over our brightness
there which is really cool. One more adjustable bar here
just below our brightness control. We have our contrast
adjustable bar. And just like our brightness control, we can
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Using the Magnifier
slide it to the right to increase our contrast of the view area
here. We slide it to the left to decrease our contrast. Let's
try that too. Let's slide it back and forth. Adjust our contrast
a bit. Yeah, sometimes not so easy to get. We'll slide it to
the right to increase our contrast and back to the left to
decrease our contrast. That's pretty cool too. Pretty neat.
A lot of control there.
I tell you, we just have so much control over our filters
here. That really is amazing what Apple has done. Okay,
so that pretty much covers all of our filter options here.
How about we just tap our filters button here again at the
bottom right corner of our screen and we'll go ahead and
just return to our magnifier view screen. We'll just touch
here. Right, and we're back to our magnifier view here.
Pretty great. We really have been given such a great built
in magnifier with so many features that really do give us
complete control over how we can view our screen or view
just about anything really. It's pretty great.
Again, my name is Douglas Walker. Take care. And I'll see
you next time.
For more for the Eye Focus series, including many other
topics of interests to individuals with vision loss, visit the
videos at Hadley page from the Hadley Institute for the
Blind and Visually Impaired website at www.hadley.edu
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