Voiceover

This morning my daughter asked for two things.  First she wanted an app she was using at school.   I thought they used computers and not iPads, but sure enough there was the app on the app store so now she’s practicing writing her letters (print, not braille) in huge format across the entire screen of the iPad.

The second thing she asked was for me to turn Voiceover on on the iPad.   And this is interesting.   In the early portion of the school year we went to dinner with her VI teacher from the prior two years and her daughter came to watch our children while we went out to eat.  Lauren is also blind but with enough vision so she can function with assisted tools.

Lauren showed my daughter how Voiceover would help her on the iPad.   That was months ago and I never heard about it until this morning.   And get this, it’s right there in the settings of the iPad.  When you turn on Voiceover you get a warning that the gestures you use are going to be changed.   You have to go back to iPad interface school basically—because it’s that different.

Here’s how it works: everything you can touch on the iPad has a spoken version of what it is.   It might be a button that reads, “Enter Name” or a video titled, “Mickey’s Space Capade”.  It could be the name of the app on the app screen or even a key on the keyboard.  

Voiceover changes things because when you tap something you’re not actually tapping it.   You’re asking to have the iPad speak out what you just touched.   If you then want to type the letter ‘R’ you double tap.   So typing ‘R’ takes three taps instead of one.

We hadn’t completely figured this out before lunch and when we came back after lunch we couldn’t get her iPad unlocked.   We thought we were entering her code but we weren’t and we got locked out several times.   She decided when we finally got in that she didn’t want a lock code anymore.

She likes voiceover but it doesn’t work on all apps, so we’ve turned it on and off.   I think we’ll mess with it a bit more and if it works well for her she can ignore the few apps that don’t support it.   She’s got plenty of apps that do.  I told her I’d teach her how to get to the area of Settings where she could turn it on and off herself.   With her vision that will be very hard to do successfully for her, but she’s tenacious and won’t give up until she can do it.

The Big Boy Update:  My son got into the attic today and discovered several things.  First he found a secret passage from the attic to the storage room behind their closet.   They were throwing a balloon down or something I think and figured out where it went.   The second thing was he opened a box and found old Wii games.    He ran down excited, saying he didn’t know we had these cool games.   I thought he’d found something my husband had bought early and hid from my son until there was a reason for him to get it as a reward for stamps or something.    I yelled down the stairs to my husband we had a problem but he couldn’t come up for a few minutes.   By then my son had found five “new” games and was positively ecstatic.   He’s been banned from the attic for now, but we did let him put up the old Wii games on the Wii U to see how they play.  

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  There was a party at our neighbor’s house a few days ago.   My daughter didn’t really go to the party, although she was invited to join the children on the bouncy house.   I told her a few hours later that everyone was leaving.   She got her shoes on and went out the door.   When I asked her where she was going she said, “I want to say goodbye to the party.”