Using an iPhone with no sight

Alice, who is totally blind and works in our Marketing team at Henshaws, talks to Mark about how she uses her iPhone.

Find out how Alice uses VoiceOver to navigate to and open apps and find out the different ways she is able to type out a message.

Summary:

In this video, Mark Belcher and Alice, a Digital Communications Officer who is visually impaired, discuss how she uses an iPhone despite her sight impairment. Alice shares her experience transitioning from using a button phone to a touchscreen iPhone with the help of Apple’s accessibility feature, VoiceOver, which reads the screen content aloud.

Alice demonstrates how she navigates the phone using gestures. She swipes right to move through apps and left to go back. She also uses the “explore by touch” method to find specific apps. To open an app, she double-taps the screen. When she wants to pause VoiceOver, she places two fingers on the screen.

Regarding typing, Alice uses touch typing for speed, where releasing her finger automatically types the selected letter. She also uses dictation and Siri to send and read texts. Alice acknowledges that dictation might have some accuracy issues, especially with complex words.

Alice has organised her phone with nine pages of apps in alphabetical order, and she uses a three-finger swipe to move between pages. She also utilises Siri to open specific apps without the need to navigate through pages manually.

Alice mentions having various mainstream apps like radio stations and BBC iPlayer alongside assistive apps on her phone. Although she plans to organise her apps into folders, she hasn’t done it yet.

The video concludes with a reminder to viewers that accessibility is essential, and users should find the best technology that suits their needs