braille input with iOS

By TechTVI, 21 June, 2012

Forum
Braille on Apple Products
Hello! I am a TVI (Teacher of Students with Visual Impairments) and I am also legally blind myself. I am an iOS user and rely on either Zoom or VoiceOver for iOS access. I recently introduced an iPad with a braille display with input keys to one my students - a fourth grader who is a fluent braille reader. She has been accessing her favorite books in Read2Go using the iPad + ALVA BC640 braille display. We also tried some basic word processing in Pages which as many of you know, can get tricky-- if you do not type quickly enough, it will throw contractions into words and it is often best to turn contractions off when editing a word. Anyway, my question is how can my student rename her documents in Pages using her braille display? When you create a new document in Pages (on the iPad) it appears as a "blank" document within the documents view area, but with VO running, we were not able to access the file name and rename it. I had to turn VO off to do this. The second challenge we encountered was typing a username and password for WIFI access while at the school site. The braille display could not enter text into these fields and I had to turn Quick Nav off and then use my bluetooth qwerty keyboard to do this. Are there some limitations to typing within text fields using a braille display? I am still a bit confused about quick nab and I am actually more familiar with the braille keyboard commands for controlling VO versus the qwerty keyboard commands. Any help you may be able to provide would be fantastic! Thank you!

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Comments

By Shersey on Thursday, July 5, 2012 - 19:33

not allow you to type into a username or password field. This seems quite strange to me. Are you sure that you're in edit mode? Quicknav is a mode that allows you to use the roter and flick gestures from a quirty keyboard or Braille display. You turn it off and on by hitting the left and right arrows simultaneously. I'm not sure of how to do this from a Braille displak, however. I hope this helps, Shersey

By John W. hess on Thursday, July 5, 2012 - 19:33

Good morning. I work as AN A.T specialist and recommend iiPad to client's. Although Paiges is a fully funtional word processor it still has accessibility challenges. I use an app called phone drive which allows transfering files from computer to iPad but more importantly than that It will allow the creation of text files and the abillity to create and rename folders as well as moveing files from one folder to another. it's totally accessible although somethings may need to be done using the touch screen rather than controling it from the display. Thisis a good way to organize files. I'm sure there are other apps that will do this and hope people will offer suggestions. Also, I suggest writing to Apple at accessibility@apple.com. They do read and respond to inquiries.