Android Accessibility

The currently available accessibility features include:

Talk back

This application reads the content of the displayed screen, it requires finger gestures on the screen by the User, in order to navigate the screen and activate the screen content.

Switch Access

This applications lets Users interact with an Android device using one or more switches instead of the touch screen. Switch Access can be helpful for people with dexterity impairments that prevent them from interacting directly with the Android device. Switch Access scans the items on your screen, highlighting each item in turn, until the User makes a selection. To use Switch Access, a User will need one or more switches. There are several kinds of switches: ;

An external switch: A switch is a device that sends a keystroke signal to your Android device. Several companies sell these devices, such as AbleNet, Enabling Devices, RJ Cooper, and Tecla. These devices connect to your Android device via USB or Bluetooth.

Users can use an external keyboard: A standard USB or Bluetooth keyboard can be configure to work as a switch device, by assigning one or more of its keys to actions. Users can also use buttons on the Android device: Built-in buttons on the Android device, such as the volume up and volume down buttons, can also be assigned to actions. This option is intended for developers.

Captions

Captions are an Accessibility Service for Android which can help deaf and hard-of-hearing users interact with their devices more easily. Other users, such as those whose first language is not English may also benefit from captions being displayed. The service will display captions in all apps that use captions, such as video apps with subtitles.

Note, the video must have been made to incorporate captions for them to be available for display.

Magnification gestures

Magnification gestures is an Accessibility Service for Android which allows visually impaired users to zoom in and pan the whole screen to get a closer look at screen content.

Users can triple-tap the screen to enter full-screen magnification and still interact with their device while zoomed in.

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Accessibility Page Control Section

Keyboard control (Chrome/Safari): Screen Speak - Press ALT + s, Pause Audio - Press Alt + p. To reset/reload page activate the Reload Page button below.

Search Section

If you are using a laptop, then to search for text on any currently displayed page press Control and F, then enter the required search text in the displayed search box. Any text found in the current page will be highlighted, you can use the up and down symbols displayed within the search box to search forward or backwards for occurrences of your search text.

If you are accessing this site via a smart phone or tablet, you will need to navigate to the 'More options' button, usually towards the top right hand side of your screen, to access your device Search options for the currently displayed page. Note that sometimes instead of the word 'Search' your device might display 'Find in page' as the option to select for searching the current page.

To search for text primarily in other pages of the Simplyinformed Website, enter text in the search box below. To get back from the search results Press ALT and Left Arrow. Please note there may be a few initial links that take you to other sites that match your site search string, these can of course be disregarded if you only want to be taken to content on this site. Please note that the Search box is displayed as a table with one row and three columns, in other there are three cells in the search table layout. Cell one is where you enter your search string and press enter, or move to cell two to activate the Search Button. Move to cell three to find the clear search content button to clear out the text in cell on, ready to enter a new search string. Use the Up and Down arrows to move through search table cells when using NVDA. Once the Narrator has been taken to the search box press the enter key so that the screen reader switches into text input mode.

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