voiceover

Easy Access To Emoji Entry With VoiceOver For MacOS, IPad And IPhone

simon accessibility , , , , , Comment

Emoji’s are something i have never had the opportunity to fully explore. As a blind person i have found them difficult to use under MacOS and iOS. There exists no simple way to search and use emoji. Apple does however, offer a fantastic system to understand emoji, so i have always felt left out. I want to use them, its just not easy to.

Well all has now changed. While, exploring accessible ways to generate slides for presentations i came across GitHub emoji short codes. A text based system that is used to generate the emoji, so for example :tada: is converted to a 🎉 emoji. This offers the entire emoji character set through text. Perfect!

Now enter another fantastic Apple tool, text replacements. With text replacements i could use the same GitHub shortcodes across MacOS and iOS to have access to the full emoji character set. This has given me complete access to the emoji set with VoiceOver across all my devices, its fantastic. The steps below will enable you to get access across all your devices.

Emoji setup

  1. follow the instructions here

That’s it, there is only one step!

I hope you enjoy full access to the emoji character set and keep an eye out for my accessible slides post!

🙈

VoiceOver on the apple watch

simon Technology , , Comment

From 9to5Mac

Like Apple’s other products, Apple Watch will have a series of key accessibility features.
To access Accessibility Settings on the fly, users will triple-click the Digital Crown.
The Apple Watch will have a VoiceOver feature that can speak text that is displayed on the screen. Users will be able to scroll through text to be spoken using two fingers. VoiceOver can be enabled either by merely raising a wrist or by double tapping the display.
Users will also be able to zoom on the Apple Watch’s screen: double tap with two fingers to zoom, use two fingers to pan around, and double tap while dragging to adjust the zoom.
There will also be accessibility settings to reduce motion, control stereo audio balance, reduce transparency, switch to grayscale mode, disable system animations, and enable bold text.

Great to see confirmation that the apple watch will support VoiceOver. From the original demo I had hoped accessibility would be baked in. Looking forward to another way to interact with my smartphone and the new possibilities that will enable. Particularly looking forward to the haptic navigation features, which is something I have been reaching out for wearable companies to add for over 2 years.