NAME: Apple Accessibilty Features Part 2.mp3 DATE: 2023-04-18 -------------------------------------------------- TRANSCRIPT: 0:00:15 Jonathan: Welcome to Blind Level Tech. I'm Jonathan Price. I'm Evan Starnes, and together we're bringing you news, tech and information about blind technologies. 0:00:25 Evan: Being blind doesn't mean you have to stop living. 0:00:27 Jonathan: We're going to show you just how possible it is to live the life you want. What's good, everybody? Jonathan Price here with Audio Information Network of Colorado. You are indeed listening to Blind Sight, and I wanted to welcome you to part two in our series, apple Accessibility Features. And last week, if you didn't hear it, you want to go back and check it out. As we touched on these sections in iOS accessibility, we looked at both the vision and physical and motor sections of Apple iOS. So we're going to get right back into part two of this. We're going to be covering hearing in general. 0:01:16 Jonathan: So here we go. All right, moving on. We are into hearing. So we have quite a few different things in the hearing device section. So if this isn't applicable to you as a low vision user, you will still find some very interesting things in this section. So we have hearing devices, and we talked a little bit about hearing devices last week with what was the bone listening device? 0:01:49 Evan: Shocks. Bone conduction headphones. 0:01:50 Jonathan: Yes. So that would be interesting to apply to this hearing devices, you can automatically pair Bluetooth devices. So if you have a Bluetooth hearing aid. 0:02:03 Evan: Hearing aid. 0:02:05 Jonathan: If you have any cochlear implants, which is amazing, by the way, my cousin has cochlear implants, and she does use this, I believe. I'm pretty sure she uses this feature with her phone. The next thing down is sound recognition. What do you know about sound recognition? 0:02:27 Evan: Sound recognition is actually a really cool feature. So basically, it has a certain list of recognized common sounds. And so if you have trouble hearing certain sounds, like baby crying, your doorbell ringing, appliance beeping, dog barking, you can turn all these on and it will send you and I was playing with this a while ago, it will send you a notification when it detects a certain sound. And what's cool is you can actually set specific notification sounds to play. 0:02:56 Evan: Like, I had my phone make a little whistle, like the old Twitter noise when the microwave beeped, and then you could actually make it play. The doorbell chime when your doorbell rings. So if you're deaf blind, but you have headphones on and you can still hear your phone, this is definitely a useful feature regardless of whether you have vision loss or not. 0:03:18 Jonathan: Yeah, and one thing to note about this specific feature is that it does require ten megabits or megabytes of space to be able to house those sounds because it's always listening to everything in your environment. 0:03:33 Evan: But it's offline, right? 0:03:35 Jonathan: Yes. If you're concerned about Amazon ordering something from Amazon or Facebook, listening to your phone, you still may have that. It just won't be through this app. Sorry, that was such a random like oh my gosh, my brain software RTT. What is RTT? Do you know what that is? 0:04:00 Evan: RTT stands for Real Time Text. So if you're in a phone call yes, it's pretty awesome. So if you're in a phone call, RTTY basically that is if somebody talks to you from the other line, it will be translated into text. And then there is actually an option where you can type text and it will be sent to somebody and they will be able to read it back to the other person. 0:04:26 Jonathan: That's really cool. 0:04:27 Evan: So it's pretty special feature. 0:04:29 Jonathan: Yeah, sort of like a visual voicemail but in live time, which is kind of cool. The next one is Audio and Visual in the this is kind of a funny this is a big one. Yeah, it's big, but it's interesting that it's in the hearing space. So in the audio visual, there is a lot of stuff happening in here. Let's go through these kind of slowly. We have headphone accommodations. What is that special? 0:05:00 Evan: So if you are using any connected headphones or AirPods, you can customize the sound of your headphones and you can actually import an audiogram and tune headphones to your ears. And if you have AirPods Pro and Pro Two, you can also customize the transparency mode for those AirPods. And so you can basically use them as what they call the hearing aid mode. And that's where you turn on your adaptive transparency and you adjust your sound amplification. 0:05:37 Evan: And so that's a really big one, especially if you don't like the way your phone sounds. If you want to make it more trebly, if you want to make it more bassy, that's where you can do it. It's a little weird that it's there. 0:05:49 Jonathan: Yeah, and they do also offer support for the Beats headphones as well. I do know that. And so you can adjust the transparency settings for both Apple and Beats and it affects the frequency range, like Evan was saying. So more bass or more treble? Or less treble and less bass however you want it. Because some people your ears will hear will lose frequency, certain frequencies faster or more differently than somebody else will. And so you may lose when you lose the higher frequencies, it's harder to understand people with their addiction. And you may have somebody who is speaking, who is a female and you may not be able to hear them clearly, but men you can with a deeper tone of voice. So it does allow you to adjust your settings that way, which can be really helpful for communication. 0:06:45 Jonathan: The next one down from headphone accommodations is background sounds in this place. Background sounds to mask unwanted environmental noises. Why would that be something you would want to turn on or off? 0:06:59 Evan: Well, there's the obvious. If you like to have sleep sounds, or you like to hear white noise or ocean or water, you can turn that on if it helps you concentrate. Some people do actually have sensitivity to sound and they can get overstimulated. So if you have like noise canceling headphones, you can put those bad boys on and turn this on and it will play a continuous sound and you can actually mix that sound so that when you play music, it will fade the sound out a little bit or when you play any audio. 0:07:29 Jonathan: Yeah, absolutely. And that's an important thing if you have children or if you yourself have some sensory processing issues, that is a feature specifically for you. So take that to heart. The next one down is mono audio. And this takes, instead of a stereo image from left to right, it will sum all of the audio, put all of the audio into one side. So if you're using that one headphone and you don't need the other one, it will put all the same audio information in both headphones. So that is something to keep in mind. 0:08:03 Jonathan: Sometimes you'll be listening to things in stereo mode where you'll have one person's voice on the left side and another person's voice on the right. Or if you're listening to music, you'll have instruments in left side versus the right side. So it's just a more immersive experience when you're listening to audio. But in some situations where you don't need that immersive audio experience, you can turn on the mono setting and you'll be just fine. You'll get all of your audio in one spot. 0:08:32 Jonathan: Phone and noise Cancellation evan, what is phone and noise cancellation? 0:08:38 Evan: So that's useful if you are using hearing AIDS or you have trouble hearing certain voices and phone calls. So what that will do is basically it will turn on noise cancellation for you as well, as I believe, but it will make any background noises from the person you're talking to. It will kind of suppress those so that you can only hear their voice. And that's pretty useful. Again, if you have trouble hearing somebody's voice and you have to turn the phone up and you can hear all their background noise, but you can also hear their voice and it's like really loud and overwhelming. Turn that on because it will make it a lot easier to hear their voice. And it's a solid feature. 0:09:23 Jonathan: Yeah, and another feature that's one that I have turned on, another one that I have turned on, which is the next one, is the headphone notifications. And so because I want to protect my ears and because my job requires my ears, I have to be sure that if I'm listening to something, I'm not listening to it for a long period of time at a high volume. So headphone notifications will protect your hearing. 0:09:47 Jonathan: It sends a notification to your phone saying you've been listening to your music for too long or too loudly at a high decibel. And so you should probably turn it down before you blow out your eardrums. Anything you want to add to that? 0:10:02 Evan: No. I have accidentally tripped headphone notifications before and it makes a cute little noise though when it goes off, but it will actually tell you, hey, your headphone level has been over 80 decibels. Now keep in mind though, if you are using third party bluetooth headphones that have their own independent volume control and your phone volume is all the way up but your headphones are down, you're going to get false notifications all the time. 0:10:26 Evan: All the time. 0:10:26 Jonathan: Speaking from experience, this is another one that is good if you are sighted but you are deaf. Led flash for alerts. This is something that my brother in law has activated on his phone and he is deaf. He is not blind, but he does this for any phone call or FaceTime or usually any notification, alarms, alarms notifications. So anything that you want that you need to be getting a hold of, you would activate this and it'll send a flash from the front. 0:11:03 Evan: It'll make your camera flashlight. 0:11:05 Jonathan: Yes. So from the back or from the front sometimes depending on the model. And I think is it Galaxy that has the front flash or does the Apple? I don't think Apple has the front flash. 0:11:19 Evan: Apple actually I believe they do in the newer iPhones. 0:11:24 Jonathan: Yeah, in the 14 or 15 that's coming out. Just keep that in mind. If you accidentally have that on and you're epileptic, have somebody come and help you turn that off because we don't want you to have an issue and end up in the hospital. That would not be fun for anybody. Okay, we completed audio visual. Moving right along. A few more left. We've got subtitles and captioning. This one is quite awesome and my mother in law uses this all the time, especially for FaceTime and messenger. 0:12:03 Jonathan: If she's on Facebook Messenger she can receive a phone call and anything I say will pop up as an instant closed caption for her. Evan, talk about that a little bit. 0:12:20 Evan: Yes, it's kind of similar to RTTY except not specific to telephone calls. And so, yeah, if you're in a FaceTime call and somebody's talking to you, there will be a little bubble and if you're in a group FaceTime call, it should, I believe, also show who is talking and it will show like the little text bubble and right as they speak it, that text will be instantly translated. I do believe that also works. 0:12:49 Evan: I haven't tested it with Braille, but it should work with Braille too. So if you are deaf blind, that's another feature and it should also affect video content too. So if you are using Apple video like Apple TV and you're playing any of videos, it will turn on subtitles/captioning for those as well. 0:13:08 Jonathan: Yes, and then right below that is a live captions beta. It's still in beta testing. That's what I have on mine. I'm not sure if you have it on yours, Evan, but it works in conjunction with the subtitles and captioning. So anytime you're in an environment, if you're talking with somebody that's even face to face to you and they don't know sign, and you maybe have a hard time reading lips, you can turn on live captions and it will detect what they're saying and pop up on your screen right away. So that's super cool. 0:13:42 Jonathan: Handy feature. All right, we have four features left, and this is in the general setting. So the general guided access. Evan, tell us a little bit about Guided access. 0:13:54 Evan: Guided Access is kind of an interesting feature. So what it lets you do is it lets you go into a specific app, and then you can lock the device into that app. And this is useful if you have like, an iPad out in public and you just want one app to be accessible and you don't want anybody else to go anywhere else in the device, you can do that. And so you turn it on, you can set a code, and then. 0:14:26 Jonathan: If. 0:14:26 Evan: You only want the Notes app to be open but nothing else, anytime somebody swipes home or tries to do any of tries to use Siri to leave an app, it won't work. 0:14:39 Jonathan: Nice. I guess that would be another level of security, which would help. 0:14:43 Evan: Yeah, it's definitely interesting. 0:14:46 Jonathan: And then the siri function. Siri has some more accessible features to it outside of Siri's normal settings settings. So let's dive into some of the Siri settings. 0:15:00 Evan: Okay. I believe one of the first options is Siri voice responses. And that's pretty cool. If you don't want Siri to talk all the time and you just want to be able to have the text of what she says come up on the screen. If you can take advantage of that, you can basically have Siri's voice responses to always. So she'll hear she'll always talk. Depending on who you have the voice on, regardless of if your phone is muted or not, you'll always get Siri voice responses. You can also have it controlled with the ringer switch on the side. 0:15:37 Evan: So if your phone's in silent and you talk to Siri, she'll be silent. 0:15:41 Jonathan: Nice. Yes, that's nice. Siri also does the pause time. No, I'm not actually talking to you, Siri. Man, you say your name too many times, she ends up coming back like Beetlejuice. Go ahead, pause time. 0:15:57 Evan: So pause time if you have issues with speaking and you enunciate more slowly, or you can't get your command across in time, you can turn this on, and it will give you more time to speak to Siri. And I believe you can actually adjust that time length. 0:16:16 Jonathan: Yeah, absolutely. And then you can adjust that time length. Let's see, this is where is it default longer and then longest, which I'm not sure exactly. What the let's see, what the longest? It doesn't say how long the longest is, but it's long enough to get your command out unless you're brain dead and you can't think of anything to say. And you're like, hey, person's name that I'm not going to say because she'll go off play and then you forget the name of your show. I've done that many times. 0:16:48 Evan: Oh, I've done that too. 0:16:49 Jonathan: We all have estimates. Another feature in this particular section is the always listen for Hay Siri. And that is also important when if your phone is face down and it's going to always be listening because it's usually on in default. When your phone is awake and being used, it's not generally listening for that command. So when you have this toggle to the on, you can have it at the dining room table, in the kitchen, in the living room, and it'll always be listening for that command, which is really great. 0:17:29 Jonathan: Announce notifications on speaker. Evan, do you have speakers that you have this attached to? 0:17:36 Evan: So that is actually a different that's a bit of a different feature. So announced notifications, we talked about this in our AirPods episode is that feature that will read text messages and it'll tell you who's calling and it'll read out selected app notifications. What that actually does is that will turn on announced notifications all the time. So if you don't even have headphones connected and you get a text, your phone will be like, new message from Valerie. Or it'll tell you who your messages are from. 0:18:05 Evan: And it basically acts as if you're constantly wearing headphones. I tried that for an hour and got sick of it. 0:18:14 Jonathan: I could imagine, let me just say, especially when you get those texts that are like, whoa, no, don't read that. 0:18:20 Evan: That's private. Hey, especially in public. 0:18:25 Jonathan: Oh, my goodness. Yeah, that's a funny prank to pull on people if you can access their phone to have all their notifications turned on. Anyway, April Fools was two weekends ago. 0:18:39 Evan: I missed the idea. 0:18:40 Jonathan: Yeah. 0:18:41 Evan: Anyway, I missed opportunity. 0:18:42 Jonathan: All right, two more and then we are done. Accessibility shortcuts. 0:18:46 Evan: Evan, we talked about this feature. This is a useful feature. This enables the triple click side button or home button, depending on your device, for accessibility features. So you can have it do things like turn on voiceover magnification, hearing features. Pretty much any accessibility feature that we talked about that's toggleable, you can map to that triple click button. Now, keep this in mind. If you map multiple features to that triple click button, it will actually pop up a little dialogue and it'll ask you which one you want to turn. 0:19:25 Jonathan: On and or off, which can also be a saving grace, because if you triple tap that and you want to pay for something, but instead you're making a phone call to your mom, that could be a little challenging. Then the last one we have, there's not really much in this one. You just have to have the patience to set it up on your own. This is a per app setting, so when you go in there and you can add a particular app. So let's say if you want to add Facebook in there, you can go through and you can add whatever app you want, but then you can customize what the accessibility features do per that app. 0:20:02 Jonathan: So it can be basically whatever you want it to be. So it's truly customizable for what you need and why you need it, versus a global setting. So, Evan, anything else you want to talk about accessibility wise? 0:20:17 Evan: No. I will say I do appreciate, though, that with all of those accessibility features, it really does make the iPhone or pretty much any smartphone a valuable tool, because it just makes it more and more possible to live the independent life that you want to live. 0:20:36 Jonathan: Yeah, definitely. So, with that being said, anything outside of what we talked about that you would like to address before we head out? 0:20:46 Evan: I don't think so. I think we covered pretty much everything. 0:20:50 Jonathan: Yeah, that was quite the intense episode. And so you may have to go through and listen to this one a couple of times, which that's fine by me, because more listens means more people listening to the show. So listen to it 100 times if you need to. If you have any questions, contact Evan or myself. Evan at Ain, Colorado. Or Jonathan. Jonathan at Ain, Colorado. Don't forget to listen to our other shows we have aftersight Blind Sight and Navigating Life. 0:21:19 Evan: Navigating life with vision loss. 0:21:21 Jonathan: Yeah. Boy, I'm having a hard time getting that name change over. 0:21:25 Evan: Call it nlvl. 0:21:26 Jonathan: I know, Nlvl. Yeah, absolutely. And then we also have Volunteer Spotlight, which Evan is the host of. So take a listen to those. And next week, I don't know what we're going to be talking about next week because I haven't planned that far in advance, but I'm going to cut this part out anyway. So join us again next week as we dive into tech and all things tech and news related for accessibility, both blind and deafblind persons. So have a fantastic week. Evan, I'll talk to you later. 0:21:59 Evan: All right, have a good one.