Siri is the virtual assistant from Apple, available to help you in iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Apple TV and Mac. We can set “Hey Siri” to respond to our voice without touching the device, or we can summon Siri with a short press on the home button.
Siri can help us, amuse us, and amaze us. Here are some of the things Siri will do. You just have to know how to ask. When used with VoiceOver, Siri always speaks back.
Top 20 Siri Voice Commands
Open an app…”Open Camera.”
Reminders…”Remind me to bring home milk.”
Weather…”What is the weather in Seattle?”
Make a phone call…”Call Mitchell.”
Text message…”Tell Evan I’ll be there in 10 minutes.”
Email…”Send an email to Danielle.”
Clock…”What is the time in Rome?”
Set an alarm…”Wake me at 6.”
Music…”Play Let It Be.”
For more you can just ask Siri…”What can you do for me?”
Settings…”Turn on Do Not Disturb.” And more.
Translate…”How do you say Good Morning in Spanish?”
Finding the right gift, for someone who has a visual impairment, can be complicated. Great gifts come in many forms and at many prices. So, as usual, we are including some gifts that don’t cost a lot and some that don’t cost anything, because the gift of empowerment is priceless!
Gift Box With A White Ribbon In Female Hands. Gift Giving. The Woman Gives A Gift. Birthday Present.
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⭐️These Gifts are Priceless…
• OE Subscription – Free
Sign someone you love up for monthly email updates providing the best practical tips and most encouraging advice for living with vision loss. And get them connected to the OE Patients Podcast, a must for listeners with low vision, available on OE, Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
This free app connects visually impaired and blind users with 4 million sighted volunteers, ready to lend a good pair of eyes, or get specialized help from Google, Microsoft, LinkedIn, Spotify, Accessible Pharmacy and many more.
A must-have stocking stuffer. This is the most coveted and appreciated writing tool for low vision users. Its dark bold line never bleeds through paper. Buy on Amazon.
• AutoDrop – $7
Another great stocking stuffer that everyone will thank you for. This guide for getting the drops into the eye, not all over the face, is inexpensive enough to give in multiples.
Image shows vibrant and delicious looking freshly picked oranges.
• A Case of Oranges -$30+
Citrus is getting a lot of good press, and oranges are always a crowd pleaser. We are learning that an orange a day, may keep the vision loss at bay, particularly in the case of age-related macular degeneration. Send someone you love a case and help them get into the regular habit of enjoying the benefits.
Treat someone you love to a subscription and they’ll get to enjoy 1 new audiobook, of their choosing, each month.
Visit the Audible website and you might even find a special deal.
Image shows hand holding smartphone while using Aira app in supermarket.
• Aira – $30+ a month
Everyone with vision loss should know there are professionally trained agents available on this subscription based service to assist with all kinds of tasks through the smartphone camera, on the Aira app. Call for help reading cooking directions, setting a thermostat or appliance setting, confirming a location and reading text. Help is also available fee free at guest locations like: AT&T, Bank of America, Starbucks, Target, Walgreens and Wegmans.
Subscriptions begin at $29 a month for 30 minutes.
Fund a subscription or give a gift credit at: Aira.io
Call Customer Care: 800-835-1934
• GoGo Grandparent – $10+ a month
The service will not only get you an Uber or a Lyft without a smartphone, it now accepts phone orders for delivery of meals and groceries. Open an account for someone you love or upgrade them to GoGo Gold. Here’s how it works:
A most desirable gift for anyone, but particularly sweet and thoughtful for someone with vision loss who depends on the audible features of their mobile devices. Pairs with Apple devices without needing even a click.
This gift will eliminate the potential for self-loathing that occurs when you can’t find keys, wallets or other personal essentials. A small disk is attached to lead you to the item or prevent it’s loss to begin with.
At this point, the Amazon Kindle is a classic e-Reader and an old favorite among people needing a boost in contrast or font size. The Kindle Paperwhite is a great choice and one of the truly easy electronics to operate.
Alexa, Google, Siri, it’s your pick, we love them all! A variety of models to choose from, with something for everyone. This is a most desirable gift and it’s perfectly fine to have more than one around the house.
The voice-controlled smart speaker connects to the intelligent assistant Alexa. Ask for news, weather, sports scores, trivia. It will read you a book or order your groceries, and that’s just the beginning. This item has been widely adopted by people with low vision and blindness. It’s good for everyone!
Gift cards are the most popular gift in America, they provide benefit to the giver and the receiver, especially easy when they’re digital. It is perhaps the most thoughtful gift of all, to fund the gift your recipient desires.
There is something magical about dictation. Spoken words are rapidly turned to text. The instantaneous nature is pretty amazing, but the best thing is dictation takes the place of typing.
Whether you have a visual impairment, or not, typing on a tiny touchscreen keyboard is a tedious task. That is why more and more people are becoming dictators.
In Apple iOS devices, Dictation is available whenever there is a keyboard on screen. The Dictation button is the microphone icon at the lower right corner or left of the Space Bar, depending on device. If the microphone key is not there, first go to Settings and click General, next click Keyboard, now go to Enable Dictation and turn on.
Here are the steps for dictating with iPhone or iPad.
Tap on the Dictation / microphone button below the keyboard and be prepared to start speaking following the single ding tone.
Finish speaking and tap again, you will hear a second single ding and your spoken words will appear in the text field.
(With Apple’s VoiceOver screen reader use a two-finger double tap to activate Dictation, and a second two-finger double tap to stop, VoiceOver then reads the text aloud.)
iPhone screenshot shows microphone button on search bar and below keyboard.
Speak clearly for best results. Noisy environments will create conflict. Dictate one sentence at a time for accuracy. Correct errors on imperfect transcripts or delete all and try, try again.
To include punctuation, just say so. Finish a sentence with a “period” or a “question mark.” Follow a salutation with a “comma“ or a “colon.” Also say, “new line,” new paragraph,” “all caps,” “apostrophe,” “hyphen,” or “exclamation mark.”
Practicing can actually be fun, so go ahead and do it. You’ll be a powerful dictator in no time!
An unknown app named OneStep Reader mysteriously appeared in an iOS app update. It became clear upon opening it, this was an old app with a new name. The app, formerly known as KNFB Reader, was taken over from the National Federation of the Blind by Sensotec. Beyond the name and the ownership change, not much else is new, even the $100 purchase price remains the same, which is likely to be its greatest barrier to growth, considering there are many good alternatives at fractions of that cost. It will be interesting to see what Sensotec has in store. Perhaps the most impressive note to this story is how far the OCR technology has traveled to arrive at this place, and how far we’ve come in our expectations.
The article below, published in 2018, provides a brief history of KNFB Reader.
Do you need help reading mail, package info, handouts, cooking directions, price tags, signs? There’s an app for all that. The KNFB Reader converts text to speech, instantly.
It is worth noting: this is technology with a pedigree. Developed by Ray Kurzweil, currently Director of Engineering at Google, he is the father of OCR (Optical Character Recognition). In its original form, it took shape as the Kurzweil Reading Machine for the blind. The year was 1976, the machine was the size of a dishwasher and the cost: $40,000.
In 2008, Kurzweil and the National Federation of the Blind joined forces to introduce the first mobile version of the reading machine. It ran on a Nokia phone and was priced at a shocking: $3,000.
Just a few years later, the much anticipated KNFB Reader App for iPhone (and iPad) was delivered to the App Store. The Android and Windows apps followed, and they’re all compatible with their respective screen readers.
The KNFB Reader app opens the camera. The right side of the screen offers a “field of view report” to assist alignment of the picture. Tap the left side of the screen to snap the photo. In seconds, the text appears and the reading aloud begins. It’s fast, accurate and relatively easy to use.
The app includes a quick start guide and manual. Read and save multi-page documents. Multiple languages are supported. Set to automatically save files to Dropbox, Microsoft OneDrive, or Google Drive. In recent updates, you can make calls, send emails, and open links directly from documents. You can even contact someone from a business card.
This is relatively easy to use, but like all new things, it may require a bit of acclimating. Practice makes perfect! The incredible benefit is well worth the effort.
You just might start wondering how you functioned without it.
Please note that this article was not paid for, affiliated with, or endorsed by any third-party companies. The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author’s.
Originally published on August 3, 2018 and updated on April 14, 2022.
In the early summer of 2013, Edythe Heyman came to my office, at the Lighthouse in New York, for a scheduled technology consultation. Diagnosed with macular degeneration in her 60’s, she had been legally blind for many years, and was then just months from her 90th birthday. With vision loss progressing, and no treatment or correction in sight, Edythe was referred to me, by her retina specialist, to explore the ways she might use an iPad. Seeking solutions to compensate for vision loss, she was particularly interested in finding ways she could continue reading The New York Times. I well understood the proposition, it was among the top requests from low vision patients and a loss I had experienced myself.
Although she did not use a personal computer, Edythe was not new to assistive technology. She utilized a video magnifier to read mail, for example, but it was not conducive to reading a newspaper.She adopted an early version of the OrCam reader, but that too, proved to be less than optimal for reading the news. She was able, however, to satisfy her love of books, by switching to audiobooks, with a subscription to the National Library Service Talking Books program, early on.
At our first meeting, I demonstrated how Apple’s iOS devices used the VoiceOver screen reader to turn text to speech. We explored the ways Edythe might use an iPad to read The New York Times, read e-Books, audiobooks, and communicate by email, all by mobile apps.She was anxious to give it a try, and we gave her the opportunity to navigate the touch screen, trying out some of the VoiceOvergestures that give the iPad (and iPhone) a voice. She also got to try out some of the Siri voice commands and very quickly became interested to get started learning. I provided the details she would need to buy her iPad at the Apple Store and get it set up properly andWe reviewed how the training would be structured. I then cautioned Edythe, as I did everyone about to embark on the VoiceOver learning experience, “It will not be easy. You must be willing to work at it. Practice, on a daily basis, is essential for success. It will be frustrating at times, but soon it will become second nature. Learning VoiceOver is well worth the effort and it will change your life!”
A fair number of my potential students leftwith the iPad or iPhone buying instructions in hand, and the cautionary words echoing in their head, never to be heard from again. Edythe Heyman returned one week later, with her new iPad, all set up and ready to go. She was able to accomplish her goal of reading her favorite newspaper again, everyday, with efficiency and with joy. She learned to communicate with family and friends by email, using a combination of Siri and VoiceOver, and she delighted in saving photos sent by family to her iPad Photos app.
Photo of Edythe Heyman at age 92 Image Credit: Lighthouse Guild
Edythe was not only there to learn, she was also there to teach us. A Lighthouse Guild Vision+Health publication from 2015 states, “At 92 years old, Edythe Heyman proves that there is no age barrier to learning new technology. No longer able to read standard print, she has embraced accessible technology to help her stay informed and in touch.‘One of my great pleasures was taking The New York Times with me to the breakfast table and reading it. I can’t do that anymore,’ says Edythe, ‘Now I can access The New York Times app, listen to the latest books and use email.’
Edythe Heyman passed away, at age 98, on December 1, 2021. The New York Timesobituary in her memory ended with, “Edythe’s friends are asked simply to remember her.” She was a friend of mine and a generous supporter of the Association for Macular Diseases, OE Patients, Lighthouse Guild and many other organizations. She was an inspiration and she will be missed.
When a visual impairment makes reading screen text, on a mobile phone or tablet, an arduous endeavor, it may be time to embrace VoiceOver (VO). The gesture based screen reader, built-in to the Apple iPhone and iPad, will read the words to you.
Turning on the Apple iOS screen reader can be as easy as asking Siri to “Turn on VoiceOver.”It can also be turned on in Accessibility Settings, and an Accessibility Shortcut can be set to turn on, or off, from the home screen.It is wise to first get comfortable turning VoiceOver on and off, as the regular touchscreen gestures are not functional while VO is in use.
Once VoiceOver is engaged, on your iPhone or iPad ,it requires the use of unique gestures to navigate the screen. For example: Touch or tap once to select an item and the voice tells you what it is, then double tap, anywhere on the screen, to activate the selected item.There are 12 VO gestures listed below to practice. It takes some time and concerted effort to switch from seeing to hearing the text, but it is well worth the work.In fact, once mastered, this method evokes joy.
The key to success is repetition, so go ahead and practice, practice, practice. Before long you will have learned to listen and move around the screens with great ease. The VoiceOver gestures will become second nature, committed to muscle memory.
Use your earbuds or AirPods and VoiceOver will speak just to you, privately in your ear.
Stylish mature woman practicing VoiceOver gestures on her iPhone.
Here are the Voice Over Gestures you need to know.
Single Tap — select an item and it speaks
Double Tap — activates selected item (tap anywhere on screen)
One Finger Flick — right or left reads from item to item (left or right)
Two Finger Swipe Down —starts reading at selected item
Two Finger Swipe Up –- starts reading from top of page
Three Finger Flick Right –- scroll forward one page
Three Finger Flick Left –- scroll back one page
Three Finger Flick Down/Up –- scroll up or down one page
Three Finger Flick Down on Home Page — to open search field
One Finger Swipe Down to 1st vibration (or with Home Button swipe up from bottom) — to open Control Center
One Finger Swipe Down from Top to 2nd vibration (or press on Home Button)— for Notifications screen
One Finger Swipe Up from Bottomto Top (or Press Home Button Twice) —for App Switcher
(*Note: There is a “Screen Curtain” option that blackens the screen while using VoiceOver. It is sometimes turned on accidentally when 3 fingers touch the screen 3 times. Tapping with 3 fingers 3 times again will restore the screen.)
Don’t forget, should you need help — call Apple Accessibility Support at 877.204.3939.They are on call 24/7 and Voice Over is one of their specialties.
If you like having the news read to you, it should come as no surprise many others do too. It’s a welcomed option for people with vision loss, and a much appreciated alternative for people driving cars, commuting, working out, taking a walk or cooking dinner.You may be one who also prefers listening to a human voice, as opposed to a computer simulated voice. The good news is you can get all that now, and more, for a small fee.
There is an abundance and a diversity of news stories available daily, on the News app from Apple, without a fee. However, the Audio content is part of the Apple News+ upgrade, for $9.99 a month in the US, and in the UK, Canada and Australia (with price converted based on currency , of course). The premium subscription gives you access to over 300 popular magazines, newspapers and digital publications in addition to the Audio features.
Image shows screenshots of Apple News+ Audio and magazines pages.
A curated selection of new Audio stories are produced each week highlighting longform journalism from a variety of publications that include Wall Street Journal, Time, Wired, Los Angeles Times, Vogue, Esquire, and Sports Illustrated, to name just a few. You’ll find a breathtaking catalog of publications in the Apple New+ subscription like The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, National Geographic, Vanity Fair, O Magazine, Food & Wine, Architectural Digest and hundreds more.
Apple News Today is a hosted daily news update available free to all listeners, Monday through Friday. This audio feature is a podcast review of the important topics of the day with a look at how top journalists are reporting the news.
Let’s not forget, there are a number of ways to get Apple News content read to you utilizing one of these useful features found in Apple Accessibility Settings: Speak Screen, Speak Selection and VoiceOver. These are excellent solutions for reading all print articles, courtesy of the computer voice, which honestly, to most ears, is quite good,
Apple News is available free on iPhone, iPad and Mac devices which offer an opportunity for customers to experience a free month subscription when adding Apple News+.
Here is the second installment of Siri commands that are useful, whether you have a visual impairment or not.
Set “Hey Siri” to respond to your voice without touching the device, or call on Siri with a short press on the home button.
Siri can help us, amuse us, and amaze us. Here are some of the things Siri will do. You just have to know how to ask. When used with VoiceOver, Siri always speaks back.
Settings…”Turn on Do Not Disturb.” And more.
Translate…”How do you say Good Morning in Spanish?”
Siri is the virtual assistant from Apple, available to help you in iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Apple TV and Mac. We can set “Hey Siri” to respond to our voice without touching the device, or we can summon Siri with a short press on the home button.
Siri can help us, amuse us, and amaze us. Here are some of the things Siri will do. You just have to know how to ask. When used with VoiceOver, Siri always speaks back.
Open an app…”Open Camera.”
Reminders…”Remind me to bring home milk.”
Weather…”What is the weather in Seattle?”
Make a phone call…”Call Mitchell.”
Text message…”Tell Evan I’ll be there in 10 minutes.”
Email…”Send an email to Danielle.”
Clock…”What is the time in Rome?”
Set an alarm…”Wake me at 6.”
Music…”Play Let It Be.”
For more you can just ask Siri…”What can you do for me?”
The iPad first came into the world in 2010 with a lot of anticipation and a big question. Does anyone really need this tablet? With sales of 350 million iPads to date — the answer is a clear and resounding — yes!
In terms of mobile devices, tablets are advantageous to visual accessibility, because of the larger screen. Vision settings to increase text size or zoom in and out on the screen can significantly improve the visually impaired reader’s experience. The original 9.7-inch screen, and the 7.9 inch Mini were joined this year by a larger iPad Pro 12.9 inch screen.
While the accessibility of mobile devices has come a long way in a short period, all are not created equal. Amazon, Samsung, and Microsoft have tablets on the market at a variety of prices and different degrees of accessibility.
Apple set the accessibility bar very high from the start and it appears the competition is having a hard time reaching it. Apple has long been known for its user-friendly design and their move to mobile brought that sensibility to a whole new level.
The touchscreen is a simplified computer interface. This is your finger interacting directly on a screen — no keyboard to coordinate with a mouse and a screen. You can learn to use a touch screen much more readily, no need to have any computer experience. It is far less intimidating.
The iPad accommodates every degree of vision loss — right out of the box. We can each find our own best combination of settings and features; utilizing vision, speech, and voice commands.
The screen has sharp clarity. The brightness can be adjusted up or down. The contrast can be reversed to diminish glare by making the letters white on a black background. The text size can be increased. The zoom feature can be set to magnify the entire screen to your preference; zoom in and out with a three finger double tap.
The iPad also offers a number of speech options. If from time to time you would like to have a page read to you — turn on “Speak Screen” and swipe down with two fingers. If you find visual reading is no longer pleasurable — consider switching to VoiceOver.
VoiceOver is a screen reader that converts all text to speech. It has its own set of VO gestures. It takes a bit of time and repetition to learn the VO gestures and get used to listening to the audio output. This transition is well worth the work as it can return you to complete digital access.
Dictation is a very popular alternative to typing. Whenever the keyboard is engaged, you can select the Dictate key, on the bottom left, and say what you would like to type. Your spoken words are converted to text quickly, and with practice…accurately.
Then, of course, there’s Siri — your virtual assistant. Siri can do a lot for you — just ask. Send a text message, set an alarm, get the weather, schedule an appointment or a reminder, open an app, find a restaurant, and much more. Siri can be useful and fun.It’s also true that your virtual assistant can be unresponsive and frustrating at times. Don’t be deterred…she’s getting smarter every day.
Apple’s Accessibility Support line provides an unparalleled benefit. Senior Apple Care Specialists are available 24/7 to assist their customers with vision, hearing, motor, and learning impairments. Get help setting your accessibility, learning to use an Apple feature or app, get questions answered and problems resolved.
Don’t hesitate to call Apple Accessibility Support for help. That’s what they’re there for!
Before you can begin to learn to use your iPad, it must be set up to your preferences. The easiest way to do this is with Personal Setup at an Apple Store or Apple Accessibility Support (877.204.3930).
The iPad can potentially do a hundred things for you — try not to be overwhelmed by that. Pick your priorities — the things you will use the iPad for every day, like email, news, or book reading.
Learn one app at a time, thoroughly. The learning process comes down to focus and repetition. If you use something every day and repeat the steps over and over, 20 or 30 times, it becomes ingrained. It becomes second nature.
Repetition is the key to learning to do almost everything — especially navigating apps. This is not about whether you are a technophile. This is simply about whether you will repeat an action enough times to commit it to muscle memory.
So don’t be afraid to touch the screen, again and again. It is the only way you can learn. Watching or listening to tutorials can be useful, but there are really no shortcuts. You can only learn by doing — and you will make mistakes as you go. Try to remember that every mistake will also teach you something.
The general rule of thumb, in the early stages of learning this, is to spend a minimum of 1 hour a day.
First things first. Learn to power up and power down your iPad by pressing down on the Power button for a couple of seconds. Use the same button to put the iPad to sleep, and then wake it, with a quick press of the Power button. Repeat until comfortable. Use the Home button to bring up home pages. Repeat. Find the side Volume controls for increasing / decreasing sound.
Learn to navigate the home pages. Swipe left and right to move from page to page. Open and close apps. You will develop a familiarity with the screens and the touch.
When you are generally comfortable getting around the iPad screens — move on to an app you will be using every day, like iBooks. Books in print can become challenging to read for anyone experiencing a vision impairment that cannot be corrected. The iBooks app provides electronic books that accommodate significant increases in font size and a selection of preferred font style. Increase or decrease the brightness of the screen, and change the background color.
You may even want to try having the book read to you. VoiceOver is the screen reader in Apple’s iOS mobile devices (iPhone & iPod as well) which will read the text aloud. This audible access is navigated with a different set of gestures from the visual access. Click here for a guide to VoiceOver Gestures.
Books are downloaded directly into the iPad from the Library tab. Search for the book by title, author, topic or browse by categories on the bottom toolbar.
Familiarize yourself with the tabs at the top and bottom of the iBooks screen. Then begin to enjoy a good book.
And you don’t have to go it alone. Should you need some help…pick up the phone and call Apple Accessibility at 877.204.3930. Specialists are available 24/7 to support customers with visual impairments.
Once you can get around your first app with ease — you have set the foundation for moving on to others. If the iPad can give you back book reading, it can potentially give you back newspaper reading, and email. It may help you to keep your Contacts, Calendar, Notes or Reminders. You can use it as your Camera (with a big viewfinder), and your Photo album with a Zoom feature.
