“Plenty has been written about the new iPhone 4S, with its voice-controlled virtual assistant Siri, and about iOS 5, its software,” David Pogue reports for The New York Times. “But in writing a book about both, I stumbled across an amazingly thoughtful feature that I haven’t seen a word about: something called AssistiveTouch.”
“Now, Apple has always gone to considerable lengths to make the iPhone usable for people with vision and hearing impairments,” Pogue reports. “If you’re blind, you can literally turn the screen off and operate everything — do your e-mail, surf the Web, adjust settings, run apps — by tapping and letting the phone speak what you’re touching.”
“One new feature, called AssistiveTouch, is Apple’s accessibility team at its most creative. When you turn on this feature in Settings->General->Accessibility, a new, white circle appears at the bottom of the screen. It stays there all the time,” Pogue reports. “When you tap it, you get a floating on-screen palette. Its buttons trigger motions and gestures on the iPhone screen without requiring hand or multiple-finger movement. All you have to be able to do is tap with a single finger — even a stylus you’re holding in your teeth or fist.”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “jmmx” for the heads up.]
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Stevie Wonder thanks Steve Jobs, praises Apple for iOS accessibility – September 15, 2011