So I'd like to start with my review of Braille screen input by going to my Android device. Now, Android has gotten a bad rap lately about its support talkback of its support of braille displays and the HID braille displays in particular. But it has a very robust set of gestures and support for Braille screen input. And I'm running the latest version of Talkback 14. So here is how I'm going to get to the talkback settings.
Talkback menu actions in list okay, so.
Here we have actions talkback settings and here are the talkback settings.
Talkback settings navigate up button out of.
Listen and in here there is Braille.
Customize menus nine automatic descriptions for I Braille heading eleven and 17 automatic descriptions for Braille Braille keyboard twelve of 17.
That'S what we want.
Braille keyboard Talkback navigate up button out of list preferred Braille Grade we have.
Our preferred braille grade which you can.
Set layout adapt to how you hold the device.
Six of eight and there's a the layout, whether it's tabletop or screen away mode. But within these settings, you also are going to have a little part at the top is how to use the Braille keyboard and you can review all the gestures, the language. You can set the language and of course I have mine set to ueba and preferred typing language. Preferred braille is contracted. The layout I have is the screen away mode. There's also a setting called include all pressed dots. And the challenge with that is if you accidentally touch the screen with a finger and you didn't mean to, then that dot is added to the next screen press. You can also reverse the dots and so forth. So those are some of the settings. So what happens here is we're going.
To go up here to prefer typing language. Languages unit review all gestures two of.
Eight can review all gestures.
Braille keyboard gestures navigate up button out Braille keyboard gestures basic controls add spaces, delete hide the keyboard, and more. One of five enlist five items.
So there's a few items in this list that are big broad categories.
Cursor movement, move by character, word or line, two or five text selection and editing select copy, cut paste three or five spell check find misspelled words, check suggestions and confirm changes four or five.
Okay, so there's actually no fifth item, which is kind of weird. We just get a little thunk there. So I would like to kind of go over some of these gestures. It's very robust, as you can see. There's cut copy paste. I don't believe the iOS has that. I could be standing corrected here, but if you're using the braille keyboard and you want to dismiss it, it's a swipe up with three fingers, and then if you want to add a space, it's swipe right. Delete is swipe left. Those two gestures are the same. If you are multi platform user, it might be a tall order to learn both of these at the same time because the gestures are somewhat different. If you want to create a new line, you're going to swipe right with two fingers. And if we want to delete a word, we're going to swipe left with two fingers and move the cursor up. It's going to be swiping up. Move cursor down is swipe down. Hide the keyboard is a swipe down with two fingers. That's a good one. If you want to go back to the regular on screen QWERTY style keyboard, if you want to switch to the next keyboard, swiping down with three fingers will allow you to choose a keyboard. If you want to swipe up with two fingers, you'll be submitting text. There are other options too, and that would be a swipe up with that would be three fingers. You can also switch granularities. You can move by character, word, etcetera. So to enter this mode, you would swipe left or right with three fingers, and then if you wanted to move to the next or previous item, you could swipe up or down. And here's where it gets tricky. If you want to move to the previous or next character, you're going to hold six and then swipe up or down anywhere. If you're going to move to the previous word, you're going to hold down dot five and swipe up or down. And if you want to move to the previous or next line, you're going to hold down four and swipe up or down. There's a way to move to the beginning or to the end of the text. There's also text selection and editing, so I don't know that we have this on iOS, so I wanted to go over this. So you would use the above movement commands where you were moving by character, word or line and but you would swipe up or down with two fingers instead. So there's a bit of memorization going on here, but for a dedicated braille screen input user, this would be second nature if you used it a lot. You can also select all the text by holding four and swiping left with three fingers. Copy is hold four and swipe down with three fingers. And cut is hold down four on the screen and swipe up with three fingers. Paste is hold four and swipe right with three fingers. So just a bit of memorization here. And there's also a way to find the misspelled words and hear those options and also confirm your spelling suggestion. You can undo the spelling suggestion and so forth. And so those are some of the Android commands with all the various swipes and gestures and things. And again, the way you get to that is by the talkback settings and then the braille keyboard. And then within that there are the various categories. So we'll get out of the talkback settings here.
Text selection and editing.
We'll get back here five navigate up.
Button, talk back, review all gestures, two of eight, enlist eight items and then.
If you back out of that you'll be back home. So to talk about the iOS, there are various commands, as I said, that are the same. So swiping right with one finger is going to insert a space. Swiping left with one finger is going to delete a character, move to a new line. You're going to swipe right with two fingers, cycle through spelling suggestions. Is a swipe up or down with one finger, enter a new line or send a message as a swipe up with three fingers. And if you want to switch between six dot which you or contracted, so six dot being no contractions, you would swipe right with three fingers. So if you have a word like have, you type an h on the screen and you want to immediately translate that. That means you want to make it the word have without inserting a space. So translate immediately. That's what that is. So typing a letter that is a contraction or a sign that is a contraction, not wanting to insert a space, you, if you have contractions enabled, you would swipe down with two fingers. If you want to switch to a new keyboard, it's a swipe up with two fingers, which is different than the Android. And if you want to exit braille screen input, you're going to do a two finger scrub or you're gonna adjust the rotor, that little twisty, turny motion that you make with your fingers, you wanna adjust that to another setting and that dumps you out of the braille screen input. Also you can recalibrate the dots. So if you're using an iPhone, if you wanna place your fingers on the screen and show the screen what your finger placement is so that it can recalibrate on the iPhone, you're going to place the right hand dots first and then you're going to replace. You're going to place the left hand dots. So four, five, six and the lift and then one, two, three is my understanding with the iPad you're going to press all of them at the same time. And of course there's a way to change all the settings in braille screen input. You're going to go to settings, accessibility voiceover Braille Braille screen input so you can choose six dot or contracted braille as the default, or you can reverse the dot positions. I've never done that. I'm not sure quite why folks feel more comfortable with that. And you can put it in eight braille so you can find all this information for iOS at support dot apple.com. and I just did a search for Braille. So braille screen input is a great way to practice your braille. It will verbalize the letters as you type them. Of course you don't get the tactile information and reinforcement, but you do get the input practice, which I think is really very important as well. So that when you get to a Perkins brailler or a little note taker or ereader, you're able to input your braille, which is is something that I need to work on with my students. I am much better at teaching them to read and need to remember to always give them lots of transcribing or writing opportunities. Hope you've enjoyed this little presentation on braille screen input from an Android or iOS perspective. Have a really great rest of your week and we'll catch you next time.
Hey all, Marty here. Today I am going to show you how to empty your trash in Apple mail. We've been getting a ton of questions in recent days and weeks about how to do this. People are confused. They think that once you delete the email out of your inbox that it's gone. But actually that isn't true. It goes into the trash within mail. So first let me tell you how you get there. So first, what you want to do is open up mail. And when you open up mail, you should see a list of folders starting with inbox, drafts, sent, things like that. Now, if you don't open up to this list, you may be in your inbox or maybe some other folder like junk or something like that. So if you are in one of those, let's just say you're in the inbox and you see the list of all of the email that people have sent you in a list, what you would want to do is go up to the top left corner and you want to do a single finger double tap on the back button. Once you do that, you're going to be back into that list. So then once you're in that list, what do you want to do is scroll down to the trash folder. Once you see the trash folder, you do a single finger double tap to open that, and now you're in the trash folder. You're going to see all of the emails in the trash there, and you can get rid of them by doing one of two things. You can do one at a time. And if you want to delete something one at a time, you would put your finger on the sender or on the description, you know, and then you would flick up until you hear delete. Once you hear delete, you do a single finger double tap and it will delete it and it will be gone forever. Now, most people have a ton of stuff in their trash and they want to get rid of it all at once. They don't want to do one at a time, unless you're looking for something specific before you just empty the whole entire trash. So the way you would do this is you would go up to the top right corner, you would hit edit, then you go to the top left corner and you would do select all. Then you go down to the bottom right corner and do delete. And then that will empty everything in your trash all in one fell swoop. So there you go. That's how you empty the trash in Apple mail, on an iPhone or an iPad.
So in the blindness community, there's been a mainstream technology that's been kind of taken the world by storm. That is the meta ray band glasses. Meta is the company that ultimately is behind Facebook and Instagram and WhatsApp, but they have partnered with ray ban to produce some smart glasses that come in multiple different styles. I have the wayfarer on, and you can use these glasses to ask questions about your environment. You can use the meta AI to ask questions about what you're looking at by saying, hey, meta, look and describe what I'm currently looking at. The meta glasses come in a hardback case that you can use to charge your glasses. The case charges via USB C here at the bottom, and there's a button on the back that allows you to put the case in pairing mode. So you can connect your glasses, simply pull your glasses out of the case, put them on, and they connect to your phone. Most of the time, once they're connected via Bluetooth, there's a button right here on the right arm that you can press once to take a photo, press and hold to start a video. And then on the outside of the arm, there's a touchpad that you can tap on to play pause your media, double tap to skip forward, triple tap to skip back, tap and hold to activate the assistant without having to say, hey, meta here on the left side is a twelve, I believe it's a twelve megapixel camera. And on the right side is an alert light to let other people know that you are recording video when applicable. The meta ray ban glasses sound amazing when you put them on. That was my first impression once I put them on, said, whoa, these sound great. And it was also a good experience for the people that I called. So if you're looking for an affordable, even if all you do is use them as Bluetooth headphones, pair of glasses that can provide you some extra smarts, and I'm really intrigued to see what else is coming on. I told Stephen at double Tap, I have never been excited for a meta event until this year, so I'm really excited to see how things grow in the future. Meta ray ban, check them out if you're interested.