Speakerphone

This should be an easy thing, getting my daughter into speakerphone mode for when she wants to talk to Mimi, Aunt A, or Nana.   It shouldn't be that complicated.   Only it was.   Let me set it up from the start:

My daughter had a GPS tracking watch that had a phone feature on it but it was very limited and sounded awful.   We changed her over to an older Apple Watch because of the GPS tracking capabilities and she would have a fully functional phone along with all the accessibility features that come with it.

My daughter can make calls on the watch or phone but for now, she's using Siri to ask for a contact such as Mimi or Nana.   Siri will make the call for her.   The problem was she could get all the way to this point but be unable to get the phone on speakerphone so she could swing in the back yard and hear the person on the phone she's had sat down beside it.  

There are likely a lot of solutions here but we were trying to get a certain direction of technology going with my daughter.   We want to introduce Voiceover a step at a time.  With Voiceover she can do anything without needting to see the buttons on the phone.   She knew how to turn Voiceover on the phone but there was still some confusion on what to do to get Speaker Phone going because my daughter would bring the phone to me after getting on a call and ask me to put on speakerphone.

I told my husband I was figuring this out.   I turned on voiceover on my phone and then tried to call him.   We got some information but not a solution so I tried to turn voiceover off but it instead went into "You have ten seconds to cancel before we initiate emergency SOS call".    !!! !!! !!!  We tried and tried to get it to stop the countdown and finally cleared it out at one second to go.  

Voiceover is tricky because it is mostly telling you what you're touching on the screen, not taking some action like you do when you can SEE what's on the screen already.   The touching is the seeing part.   You have to know different taps or gestures in order to then do something with what you just tapped on.   My problem was I hadn't enabled the quick toggle off of Voiceover like I had on my iPad.   And I almost called 911 accidentally as a result.  

Voiceover is incredibly powerful.   Imagine this: you're sitting at your or tablet or phone.   You get into your email, create a new email to some friends, write it, attach a URL to a web page you've been reading.    Send the email.  Go check Facebook, watch a YouTube video, and respond to a text from your mother about coming to visit this weekend.   I bet it's not too difficult to imagine doing all those things.   But now imagine it again.  Only this time, the screen on your device is completely black.   It shows nothing.   You can tap on things to hunt around and find what you're looking for, but you have to do all the above tasks without anything other than verbal feedback from your device.

That's what Voiceover is and it is incredibly powerful.   It's what my daughter will use every day.   We wanted to just figure out speakerphone though.    I had been getting inconsistent information but when my husband and I started calling each other back and forth on our phones with Voiceover on, we finally figured it out.  

It's smarter than we are.   We expected to dial the call and then find the speakerphone option once the call connected.   Here's what it was doing for us.  Press Dial and hold the phone to your ear until the call connects.   You hear it ringing and the person answering.   Pull the phone away from your ear to do something, in this case get into speakerphone, only now the keypad is showing.   Why?   We worked on that for a bit until we realized the phone turned on and off speakerphone every time you took the phone away from your ear.  

I went outside to tell my daughter and she told me she'd already figured that out earlier today.    She'd even made up a song about it and sang it to my mother on her call earlier.

We Have Two Dogs:   This would be a larger billed topic only we don't have two dogs at the same time.   We have one dog who is shaggy and looks like a general non-specific breed of fluffy white dog.   When I take her to the groomers something happens.  Instead of picking up my shaggy dog, this sleek terrier-looking snow-colored dog gets into my car instead.   Both dogs are similar in size and behavior but the motions of the short-haired terrier are so very terrier-like while the shaggy dog doesn't seem to fit a breed specifically in her mannerisms.   Odd.

The Big Boy Update:  My son figured out that thing you can do when your shirt is bothering you but you don't have a place to put it.   You take the front of the shirt up and over your head and behind.  your neck.   Now your chest is uncovered while the shirt is bunched up on the arms and around the back of the neck.   My son thinks he looks cool like this.   He practices Power Ranger moves like this.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter asked at Dinner, "Are we Jewish?  Can I be Jewish when I grow up?"  This happens at least once each year.   There are eight days of presents, right?   We only have one Christmas.   They have the dreidel game and potato latkes.   They have this cool candle they light and sing a song she can't understand but loves the sound of.   Our next-door neighbors, who have taught my children all they know about Hanukkah, are moving to another home in the area.   We're sad but glad they'll still be close.