#iACast 22 – Burn Notice

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Picture of fire proof Samsung Note 7 box with fire resistant gloves.

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Welcome to another episode of the #IACast podcast! A lot has happened since episode 21, so let’s get right to it!

Like our podcast? Please share it with others! Have a suggestion, feel free to send us an email, mention @iAccessibility1 on Twitter, and use the hashtag #IACast on Twitter. As always, thanks for listening!

Low Power Mode Explained

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Image of black screen with battery icon which is a battery with small glowing red area showing the amount of battery left to represent a time when low power ode is needed.

Have you ever wanted or needed to squeeze more power out of your phone’s battery? Low Power Mode might be the setting you are looking for. Low power mode reduces the amount of power your phone is using until it has at least 80% battery. When low power mode is enabled, it may take some time for some features to work while others will not work at all.

Low Power Mode affects:

  • Hey Siri
  • Email fetch
  • Automatic downloads
  • Some visual effects
  • Background App Refresh
  • location services in apps

How to enable low power mode:

  1. Open settings
  2. Tap battery
  3. Toggle the switch next to Low Power Mode to On

Note: When Low Power Mode is on, the battery percentage icon on your status bar will be yellow.

Traveling Made Easy with Tile

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Picture of Tile device. Device is a white square with rounded corners with the word Tile in a light grey. It also has a round hole in a corner for a key ring.

Have you ever traveled to a destination and had difficulty finding your luggage? Tile, a new device with a mobile app aims to fix this issue is now available, but is this solution accessible? Lets take a look at the app and the devices themselves.

Picture of Tile device. Device is a white square with rounded corners with the word Tile in a light grey. It also has a round hole in a corner for a key ring.•What is a Tile?

A Tile is a small device that is sure. It has the word Tile on the device, and the e is a button to press to find your phone or pair the device with your phone. There is no tactile way of knowing where this button is, so I simply pressed on the device until I found it since it is very small.

There is also a round hole in the device to add the device to your key ring so you could use it to find your keys, or attach the device to another object.

The Tile does not have a place to charge the device, so when the device runs out of battery power then it is dead. Tiles use Bluetooth LE, which stands for low energy to be found only when called upon. They use very low amounts of energy, so the battery should last for years.

Any device running the Tile app that supports Bluetooth LE is also a Tile. You can find your iPhone or iPad that is paired to a tile by pressing the e on the Tile device.

The Tile App

The Tile app is how you set up your tile devices with your phone. To use this app, Bluetooth must be on, and you must have a connection to the Internet.

Once you start the app you will need to sign up or sign in. I did not do this portion of the review with VoiceOver, so if someone could add their experience with signup in the comments then we will have a better understanding of this part of the app.

After you sign up, you will be asked to buy a Tile or Pair one. We will assume that you already have a Tile and are going to pair it with your phone or tablet. To pair your Tile to your phone, do the following steps when you are at the correct place in setup.

  1. Hold the pairing button on the Tile, which is the letter e button until it plays a note or tune.
  2. Keep the device near your phone until the phone states that it is paired.
  3. When prompted, type the name of the Tile that describes what the Tile will be used for, examples are keys, luggage, or backpacks.

While text is readable on the add screen, the buttons are not properly labeled and can be confusing.

Once a Tile is set up, you should see all of your tiles in a table view. At the time of this writing, the table view only shows button labels, and the labels that you give to your tiles during the adding process are not read by VoiceOver. You will also notice that no labels in the detail screens are read either, which makes the Tile service completely unusable to VoiceOver users. Buttons and text elements can gain focus by VoiceOver, but only the button and text label names are read instead of their contents.

Conclusion

While the Tile devices are a good way to find luggage and items that you can’t easily find, they do not offer a good experience at this time for VoiceOver users, and the lack of a tactile pairing button on the actual Tile make it difficult for visually impaired and blind users to even pair their devices to their phones.

Some of My Favorite #macOS Sierra Features

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Image of the macOS Sierra App Store Icon, which is mountains and sky inside of a circle with a border.

Sierra has been out for awhile now, and while I haven’t had the chance to play with it as much as I would like, I have found some interesting new features and changes. If you’ve been following macOS Sierra news, or if you are using the new OS yourself, you’ll probably know about most of these. However, there’s a chance you might find a few mew gems.

Siri

First and foremost, let’s get the big one out of the way! Yes, we now have Siri, Apple’s digital assistant, in macOS Sierra. The functionality is more limited than I would like, and there are a few accessibility issues with it, but it is a great start! I can’t wait to see future improvements made to Siri on the Mac.

For more coverage on Siri in macOS, check out these articles:

Unlock Your Mac with Apple Watch

Another feature we also have covered on iAccessibility is the ability to unlock your Mac with your Apple Watch. This is a huge step for convenience and security, and those who have tried this feature absolutely love it!

However, there are some limitations, such as:

  • You must have a 2013 Mac or newer.
  • You must have two-factor authentication enabled for your Apple ID.
  • You must have watchOS 3 on your Apple Watch.

Some of these limitations may be show stoppers for some users, such as myself. Unfortunately, I own a 2012 MacBook Pro, so I am unable to use this feature.

Picture-in-Picture

One of the great features from the iPad is now available on the Mac! If supported in the app, or if you are watching video in Safari, you will be able to continue watching video while working in other apps. The video will take up a corner of your screen, and you can continue working. Even if you have little or no vision, this is a great feature, because it means your audio will continue as well! Nice!

Tapbacks

Wait, what backs? LOL! Basically, reactions to iMessages is available in macOS. Want to know more about iMessage in iOS 10, check out this article.

In macOS, simply right click on a bubble, choose, tap backs, and then the reaction you want.

This feature is great if you need to reply to a message, but do not want to lose your train of thought and want to return to working quickly.

Rearranging Menu Extras

Yes! Finally! In macOS Sierra, you can now rearrange menu extras. Simply hold down the command key while dragging icons to rearrange them. Note: This feature does not seem to be VoiceOver accessible at this time.

New Notification Shortcut

Now VoiceOver users can quickly access any notifications they have waiting in an easy-to-use VoiceOver menu.

That’s right. Simply press VO+N to access new notifications. Enjoy!

One Row Added?

This is most likely every VoiceOver user’s favorite new feature, especially if they frequent Twitter. One Row Added, One Row Added, One Row Added got annoying very quickly.

Now we have more control over what happens when the number of rows changes under the VoiceOver cursor, and it is awesome! Most users will most likely choose nothing, but you can also have a sound played or have spoken feedback as before. This is great, because there are instances in which you would want to know a row has been added, such as when adding a marker to an audio file.

Related Article: There’s an Activity for That

Simplified Preferences

Take a trip through system preferences and VoiceOver Utility, and you’ll notice that some options appear to be missing, have new locations, or are worded differently. Although it is a subtle change, it is a welcome one. It helps to simplify changing preferences, and remove redundant options.

…and that’s it, at least for me! What do you think? Are there any new features I should have added? Do you think tabbed interfaces for all apps should have made it onto this list? Feel free to share your favorite features in the comments, and thanks for reading!

#iACast 21 – Pixelation

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Hello, and welcome to IA Cast, episode 21! A lot has happened in the last week, including:

Thank you for checking out our podcast! If you like what we’re doing, please share our podcast with others!

Review: Google Allo Accessibility

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Image showing the Google Allo icon

Clearly in competition with Apple’s iMessage, and other messaging services, Google recently released Allo – a messaging app for Android and iOS. Most of its features are very similar to iMessage, with a few exceptions.

First of all, as stated above, unlike iMessage, Allo is cross-platform. That means, regardless of whether you’re rocking an iPhone 7 or a samsung Galaxy S7, you will be able to use this app.

Additionally, Google’s assistant is baked right into the app. You can chat with it, play games with it, and more.

Lastly, Google will read messages sent with the service, unlike Apple’s iMessage. Note: There is a way around this, but it involves giving up most of the app’s unique features. Is that a deal-breaker? Well, that would depend on who you ask.

We have already talked about iMessage on iAccessibility, so we know it is accessible. So, how does Google Allo stack up? Is it worth using to communicate with friends? Let’s see.

The setup process is fairly straight forward. Like WhatsApp, Google Allo uses your phone number to create an account. This means you will have difficulty if you wish to message using tablets or other phones. After verifying your phone number, you are prompted to give the app access to your contacts and to send you notifications. Then you take a selfie, and add your name. And that’s it! You are all set up!

Once you’ve completed the setup process, you’ll notice there’s already a thread with Google Assistant. In this thread, there are unread messages. This is where I first began to encounter accessibility concerns on iOS, but not on Android.

The first thing Google assistant wants you to do is allow access to your location. This makes sense given the fact that the assistant can help plan a night out, among other things.

The reading of messages in this thread by VoiceOver is quite erratic. Some messages are read at least twice and out of order. I quickly learned that it is better to flick rather than to explore the screen by touch.

The smart replies are completely accessible, and I had no problems with those.

However, in some replies from the assistant, VoiceOver will get stuck in a continuous loop. For example, when asking what can you do.

Talkback, on the other hand, has none of these issues as far as I could tell. I was even able to successfully play Tic-Tac-Toe with Talkback running on Android. That was a lot of fun, and it was accessible, too!

I did appreciate the attempt by Google to make the conversation with Google Assistant more like chatting with a friend, but it was a little creepy at times. For example, it wants to know where you are and more about you. For me, it felt a little like talking to a stalker.

So how about chatting with a friend?

Well I tried that too. The same messaging issues that plague the Google Assistant message thread also affect any other threads you have. The most annoying thing for me is constantly hearing VoiceOver say, “double tap and hold to open message edit menu.” I do not know what that means. With all the double tapping and holding I did, I could not make any “message edit menu” appear.

One neat thing that Google Allo has over iMessage for me is that the quality of audio messages is so much better! I get why Apple uses low-quality recording, but it is such a disappointment. similar to Apple’s iMessage, you double tap and hold on the “record an audio message” button and swipe up to send or left to cancel.

If text effects are your thing, you can easily do this with VoiceOver running. Simply enter text, and then double tap and hold on the send button. Without releasing the button, swipe up to make text larger and swipe down to make text smaller. Note: there is no feedback to inform you of just how large or small your text is, regardless of whether you’re sending or receiving.

You can also send your location, stickers, take a photo or video (and draw on it), or attach a photo or video from your camera roll. I was extremely disappointed to discover that taking a photo or video in the app, and sending stickers are both completely inaccessible on iOS. VoiceOver sees no elements on the screen. Android, once again, has no such issues.

There are also a few inconsistencies as far as the interface is concerned. One example is to delete a conversation on iOS, you need to double tap on the menu at the top right of the screen while you’re in the conversation. On Android, on the other hand, you long press on the conversation thread and then double tap delete.

Another inconsistency is that Android users can access quick replies in notifications, whereas that does not appear to be an option on iOS. Neither version of the app allows you to quickly write out your own response, which is disappointing.

I also tried out encrypted one-on-one chats with myself, and that worked just like any other chats. The interface is dark instead of light, which I honestly preferred, and messages can be set to expire. Also, notifications are very vague, only telling you that you have a message.

Overall, I like the app. I think it’s great if you can convince enough people to download it. You can send text messages with it, but you can’t use any of the app’s main features unless the recipient of your messages is also using Google Allo. Also, there are legitimate privacy concerns. If you’re OK with Google reading every single message you send, unless you remember to start an incognito chat, then go for it! Lastly, accessibility has room to improve, especially on iOS, but it is a very new app.

What do you think of Google Allo? Have you tried it yet? Do you plan to download it? Why or why not? Let us know!

#macOS: How to Change VoiceOver’s Grouping Behavior

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Image showing VoiceOver icon. icon is a grey gradient to white with a universal access symbol and a speaker with sound waves going to the right.

I’ve been using VoiceOver for a while now. I use VoiceOver on both Mac and iOS. The more I use VoiceOver on iOS, the more I would think “I wish I didn’t have to interact so much on the Mac. Some apps take it to extremes.” You can! Actually, you’ve been able to do this with the introduction of El Capitan, but it was broken. You would get stuck in certain web tables, like the table found in the “Purchases” category in the App Store. So how do you to it? Read on to find out.

Instructions

  1. Press Command + F 8 to open the VoiceOver utility.
  2. Arrow dow to the “Navigation” category.
  3. Press VO + Right until VoiceOver announces “Grouping behavior”
  4. Press VO + Right again and you should hear “Standard, popup button.”
    Note: The other options are Bookend groups, Announce groups, and Ignore groups.

Before you change anything, let’s talk a bit more about what each option means.

Standard

This is the default setting VoiceOver uses. VoiceOver will announce a group (such as “Web content,”) and you will then have to interact with it to see everything inside.

Bookend Groups

Like the “Standard” option, VoiceOver will announce groups, but you can VO + Right to see the content inside them. Once you reach the end of the group, VoiceOver will announce something like “End of web content.” If the app had more than just the web content, you would then VO + Right to see everything else.

Announce Groups

VoiceOver will read the group title to you and the number of items it has in a lower pitch when you land on the first option that would normally be inside it with the “Standard” setting, but it will read the content first.

Ignore Groups

Like the title suggests, VoiceOver won’t tell you when you’re on a group. Rather, it will just read the content.
For example: If you open System preferences, normally you would have to interact with the “Scroll area” to see the options you have, but with this setting, VoiceOver will just read them when you press VO + Right to get to them.

Notes

  • You will need to turn off cursor rapping for these options to work correctly.
  • With the Announce groups and Ignore groups settings, VoiceOver may still announce “Web content” when a page loads in Safari.
  • In Safari, VoiceOver will sometimes act as if you’re using the “Standard” setting and not let you see what’s inside the web content until you either interact with it, or VO + Left back to the splitter and VO + Right again. Once you do that, VO will respect your group setting.

Questions?

If you have any questions, let us know and we’ll be happy to answer them.

There’s an Activity For That

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Image showing VoiceOver icon. icon is a grey gradient to white with a universal access symbol and a speaker with sound waves going to the right.

Have you ever used an app and thought “You know what? I really seem to slow VoiceOver down a lot when I use this.” Maybe you find you tend to have VO read with more punctuation in some apps more than others. If you’re tired of constantly making changes to your VoiceOver settings, I’ve got some news for you.

Customizing VoiceOver for Different Situations

Yes, you read that correctly! You can set up VoiceOver to automatically change your settings, based on what you’re doing. It’s called Activities, and it’s one of the categories in the VoiceOver Utility.

So how do you accomplish this amazing feet of computer greatness? Read on to find out!

Instructions

  • Step 1: Press VO + F8 (VO + FN + F8 on a portable Macintosh keyboard, if you haven’t changed the behavior of the function keys in the keyboard pain of system preferences.) This will open the VoiceOver utility. VoiceOver should tell you that you are on the “Utility Categories” table.
  • Step 2: Arrow down until you hear VoiceOver announce “Activities.”
    Note: You can also press Command + 0. Pressing Command + 1 through 0 will jump you to each category in the “utility categories” table in sequential order. This means that pressing command + 1 will move you to the “General” category, Command + 2 will move you to the “Verbosity” category and so on.
  • Step 3: VO right until you hear VoiceOver announce “Add” button.
  • Step 4: Press the button with VO Space.
    Note: Once you press the “Add” button, VoiceOver automatically interacts with the “Activities” table.
  • Step 5: You will now be placed on the “Untitled” activity. Press Enter, and VoiceOver should announce “Untitled, contents selected edit text.” This is ware you can name your activity so if you want to edit it later, you can find it without the need to go through the settings for each activity.
  • Step 6: After you give your activity a name, press VO + Shift + Up arrow to stop interacting with the “Activities” table.
  • Step 7: Now, you are able to choose the settings you want to include in the activity. The settings that you check are settings that when changed, will only effect the current activity you are working on. You can set the settings you check now by pressing the “set Setting name” (where setting name is the setting you’ve checked or unchecked,) or set them later. Remember that the settings that you check here are the settings that will only change for the activity you are in the process of setting up. All other VoiceOver settings you change will effect the “VoiceOver settings” activity, which is VoiceOver’s default activity. In other words, if you’ve never looked at VoiceOver’s activities, you’re using the “VoiceOver settings” activity.
    For example: I’ve created an activity called “Test.” If I check the “Verbosity” checkbox, changing any verbosity setting will only effect the “Test” activity, once I tell VoiceOver when to use the settings in this activity, but more on that in step eight.
  • Step 8: If you keep pressing VO + Right arrow, VoiceOver will announce “Use this activity for.” Pressing VO + Right again will place you on the “Apps & Websites…” menu button. Pressing this button will cause a list of apps to be displayed, as well as the choice of setting the activity up to be used with specific websites that you can add if you choose that option.

Need Help?

If you have questions about anything in this post, please don’t hesitate to let us know, and we would be glad to help you.

#iACast 19 – Not Just Any Hole Will Do

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Image showing iPhone 7 being drilled in to for non existent headphone jack.

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Welcome to the latest episode of IA Cast. In this episode, we discuss the latest news, including:

  • Some iPhone 7 owners are drilling 3.5mm holes into their new phones, because a YouTuber told them to do it! Say what?iPhone 7 users are drilling holes into their devices
  • Separate, Not EqualFind out what we think about companies that create separate interfaces and feature sets for users, depending on the assistive technology they use.on iAccessibility.net, we have an article about Twitter’s new “night mode” on iOS, but it turns out VoiceOver users can’t access this feature.
  • Now Disney wants to buy Twitter, too?It looks like Twitter is looking to be bought out! Who will win? What will that mean for us? What do we think of Disney owning Twitter?Why Disney is unlikely to buy Twitter
  • Is the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 STILL the most explosive smartphone?If you thought Samsung’s exploding battery troubles were over, think again. In the last few days, there have been reports of replacement Galaxy Note 7s overheating, and even catching fire! What happened to these new replacements being safe?Galaxy Note 7 replacement batteries catch fire, too
  • Team Tactile and Their Low-Cost Braille DeviceWe could not resist sharing this story! Not only is this group made up of young women, which is very rare in the technology industry, but they are developing a device that could literally change lives. This group of women aims to help blind and visually impaired people gain access to braille on-the-go with their braille translation device. Their target is for it to cost $100, so we can’t wait to see this device mature.How six scrappy young inventors built a breakthrough text-to-Braille translator device
  • What will home automation look like with multiple home hubs?Everyone knows about the Amazon Echo; it is clearly the gadget to beat in this space. However, Google is about to release its connected speaker, Home, and Apple is said to be working on their own speaker with Siri integration. How will these devices work together, if at all?Google Home vs. Amazon Echo: AI is Coming To Your Home

    Apple Stepping Up Plans for Amazon Echo-Style Smart-Home Device

#iACast 18 – UnboxCast Part 2

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image showing three views of the same Apple Watch Series 2

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On this episode of the iA Cast, Rich Cavallaro unboxes his new iPhone 7 Plus, and Michael Doise unboxes the new Apple Watch series 2. We set up these devices, and we take a look at the differences between load times on the Apple Watch series 2 compared to the original Apple Watch commonly known as the series 0 version.

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