Victor Tsaran | guitars | music | technology | and more

Recently I came across an interview with Steve Jobs on the subject of the upcoming iPad. Among other things the article stated the following:

“The iPad will become the first whole-house computer, shared among an entire family, passed from hand to hand, roaming freely from living room to kitchen to bedroom to — look, it's going to happen — bathroom, at ease everywhere, tethered to nothing. It's not a revolution, but it's a real change, the kind of change you notice.”

This quote made me think about a particular accessibility feature of the iPad that allows for this kind of sharing even if some members of the family require built-in assistive technology, such as the Voiceover screen reader or the Zoom screen magnifier, to use the device.

A bit of background information

Voiceover is a built-in feature of the iPhone operating system that allows blind users to take full advantage of the touch screen interface by reading out loud the items on the screen via the built-in text-to-speech synthesizer. This utility also introduces additional gestures that help them navigate between various on-screen elements (icons, text, links, buttons, etc) quickly and efficiently. Because those gestures as well as the text-to-speech feedback change the user interaction with the device, they are only available when the Voiceover screen reader is activ.

The problem

There are several ways in which a blind user can turn on the Voiceover utility. This can be done either

• through the accessibility" panel of the iTunes interface; or
• by going to

  Settings->General->Accessibility->Voiceover

  screen on the iPhone or the iPad.

Once the Voiceover is turned on, the user has to use its gestures to navigate the interface.

Turns out what's convenience for some people is an inconvenience for others. If the member of the family who is blind turns on the Voiceover and forgets to turn it off, others may have difficulties disabling the feature if they are unfamiliar with Voiceover-specific gestures. Similarly, it may be just as inconvenient for a blind person to have to enable the Voiceover each time they want to use the unit. Whatever happened to the idea of sharing the fun?

Tripple Click Home gets you home

The feature I am about to describe exists on the iPhone as well but gains even greater significance in the context of the iPad, particularly if we are talking about sharing the device among people of various technology needs.

Inside the

pannel there is a setting called “Tripple Click Home” which provides four options:

• “Off”.
• “Voiceover”.
• “Zoom”.
• “Ask”.

Any of these options will be activated once the Home button is hit three times in quick succession. By default, the setting is set to “off”.

If one of the family members is blind, you may want to make the “voiceover” option a default one. This means that you or they can toggle the Voiceover screen reader at any point by simply clicking the “home” button three times. If, on the other hand, anyone in the family wants to use screen magnification features of the iPad, choose the “Zoom” option from the screen above.

A cool bonus

I also discovered that if the Zoom magnifier is in use at the time the Voiceover is activated, iPad will return you to screen magnification interface once Voiceover is turned off via the tripple-click of the Home key.

Conclusion

Use the tripple Click Home feature of the iPhone or the iPad, found in the “accessibility” pannel under “general settings”, to enable sharing between people of various technical needs. Even if you do not plan on using either the Voiceover or the Zoom utility yourself, it may become handy in situations when you want to show something to your blind or low vision colleague. The most important thing to remember is that “tripple Click Home” feature has no impact on your personal usage preference. It just turns your entertainment device into the “sharing powerhouse”–exactly the vision that Steve Jobs alluded to in his interview.