Before We Begin- Things you should know

I have worked with accessibility features for quite some time so I thought I would share the tips and tricks of what I have learned that might be helpful for someone ready to dive into learning.

There are 3 main kinds of learners:

1. First you have the Readers, ones who will sit through the boring manual or read all of my instructions and text before beginning their own testing.
2. Next you have the Doers who may read the first sentence of your text but get so excited they decide to just flip the switch and see what happens. Try now, ask questions later.
3. Last, you have the Followers, those who prefer to see it or read it and follow along as it is done.

You can be a different learner at any given time so keep that in mind. My goal here is to try and cover all three of these learners which means there may be a long set of instructions for my readers, Bold text for warnings and tips for my Doers, and Videos or step by step guides with pictures for my Followers.

 

Words of Caution

 

Some of the settings and preferences for accessibility are fairly straight forward and easy to navigate and try on your own while others can change the basic aspects of how you interact with your device. So I will always recommend some caution especially for the Doers out there.

Advice From Someone Who Learns the Hard Way:

Make sure your device is backed up before you begin playing with your settings!

Your devices should be backed up anyways because what happens if your device falls into a lake or drops to its death? Do you want all your information to just be gone. Every picture you took, every document you worked on, etc. It’s a disservice to yourself if you don’t get paranoid about saving your hard work and important information in more than one place.

For resources as to how to back up your device, use Google with caution. For Apple devices the options are pretty clear: For macs https://support.apple.com/mac-backup and for mobile devices https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203977.

Don’t forget about Siri

Seriously, Siri has saved my life so many times when I’ve gotten stuck and can’t seem to figure out how to turn off the setting I turned on. After spending a solid 20 minutes trying to get back to the settings menu once I finally remembered that I had Siri and could simply ask “Hey Siri, Turn off Switch Control.” Which just made me feel ridiculous that I wasted that much time.

Enabling the Accessibility Shortcut option (Only on Apple Mobile Devices – Yes that means your phone).

Go to Settings > General > Accessibility > Accessibility Shortcut (at the bottom) This feature allows you to triple click the home button at a reasonably fast rate to turn on or off a feature on the list. Keep in mind this only works for VoiceOver, Invert Colors, Color Filters, Reduce White Point, Zoom, Switch Control, or AssistiveTouch.

Just tap the option you want to use for the shortcut and a blue checkmark will appear to tell you it’s active. You can have multiple options for the triple click which means it will pull up a menu and ask you to select which option you want to turn on or off.

I recommend only keeping one option checked for the time to start with because if you are having a hard time selecting things on your screen which a feature turned on then having to select from a menu can be super frustrating.

 

Other Resources You Have

 

When learning you are going to find you want to know more about something or get a different perspective. I’m not going to pretend I know everything so here is a list of resources that I’ve used and were at least moderately helpful:

• Apple keeps their own updated guides on all things accessibility from their website: https://www.apple.com/accessibility/
• Manual for your Device. Yes there are typically user guides for your electronic devices even if they don’t give you a print out. You can find them by googling or go to the Apple website and search manual.
• Just Google the accessibility setting. You may need to sift through a lot of things but there are at least a few helpful sites that will provide some different insights or tips for you. A lot of the great ones are first hand accounts on how these settings are helpful by people who actually use them daily.