Why you should or shouldn’t get an apple watch.
By Christopher O’Meally
It’s been a while sense I have posted an article to apple vis, but because the apple watch is such a revolutionary product, I was itching to. Not only is this a generation one product, but it’s one of the first generation one products that comes with accessibility in mind. It’s not the only one, but one of the first. I hope to cover a few things in this article. Mainly voice over, as this is a sight that focuses on accessibility of apple products, but also who this watch is and isn’t fore. So, without further a due, and before my manager walks over and wonders why I am typing more than usual, here we go.
The first thing I want to cover is learning curve. This is not one of those apple products that just work, to spite what apple says. You sadly just can’t pick it up and use it. Having a background in iOS or even the mac will help, as a lot of the controls are similar, but the apple watch introduces two brand new sets of controls that can sometimes be a little awkward with voice over, more on that later. But the point of this short paragraph is, the apple watch takes time to learn. Because it’s not something that sits in a pocket, on a lap, or on a desk, it’s something that is not hard to practice, as long as you wear it all the time. Whenever you go out, strap it on. If you are just walking around the house, strap it on. Sitting at your desk typing away, strap it on. When it presents an alert, interact with it. Play around with the different ways of interacting with it. GO for a walk with the workout app. Do every day things that the watch is designed to complement, and I believe this will be your best way of learning. But do not expect to take your watch out of the box, pair it up, and be able to start using it as smoothly as you would with upgrading your iPhone and instantly knowing how to use some random feature apple has decided to slap into its already
Large cluster of features. It’s not that simple. This web site offers plenty of podcasts to help you get started, but I find that the best teacher is practice. Everyone is going to use the various input methods differently, so it’s up to you to figure out what works best. Now, on to the practicality of the watch and how voice over may tie into your decision of buying the watch, or not.
One of the complaints about the apple watch going around, is that it is just a scaled down iPhone that apple has decided to wrap in flashy materials and strap to your wrist with an overpriced band. In some cases this is true, for example being able to take calls, answer text messages, email, tweets, and call Uber rides just to name a few. But the watch, while being a nitch market, does things the phone would never be able to do effectively. Those who are wearing an apple watch, take it off for a moment. Yeah yeah I know you will have to enter a passcode when you put it back on, but humor me. Those who do not yet have an apple watch, or those who think its dumb and a waist of money, or those who agree with my statement at the start of this paragraph, pay attention to this part. I am about to set that theory on its point, and punt it through the wall. Do you have your watch in your hand? Alright good. Now, take off your band, taking care not to drop your $350 plus frosted many wheat shaped computer. Now, put the watch in your hand, screen faced down, and feel that dome on the back. Not only does that sit in an inductive charging cradle, take that iPhone, but that dome is clear. Arranged in a diamond shape are four sensors. Two Infrared sensors, and two LED sensors. Take that iPhone. While those same sensors can be mounted on an iPhone with ease, the iPhone is not constantly sitting on your wrist. The watch can do things like monitor your heart rate every 15 seconds. More accurately count your steps, and more effectively take advantage of another output method I will get to later. So that’s just the physical. Alright guys go ahead and put your watches back on. The next peace I want to address is the interface itself. The iPhone has two forms of input mainly. Touch and voice. While the watch can take both voice and touch, it brings two more forms of input, one of which I suspect will make it into the next iteration of the iPhone in September. The first is similar to touch, but it takes it to a whole new dimension. The apple watch is covered with a touch sensitive screen made of Ion X glass; the same glass used in the iPhone six and six plus, or in the more expensive models, Safire crystal. But unlike the current iPhone models, the screen is mounted on pressure sensitive mechanisms, load sells of some sort. I used to know how it works, but multi-tasking between this and work has my mind drawing a blank at the moment. So if you tap, it senses that. But if you tap and press, it brings up an all new level of contextual controls specific to the screen you are on. Let me give you an example. I am in the twitter application. At a glance, all I saw was the ability to see tweets, and retweet them. I saw no way to compose a new tweet. But then I remembered force touch. I tapped and pressed, and what do you know, a tweet button faded into view right in the center of the display. Slick twitter. Very slick. So one thing to always keep in mind. If you are sure an app can do something, but you dig through the interface not finding the button you need, think about this. When in doubt, force touch. One bit of warning about force touch. Sometimes the buttons break and end up stuck up on the display. I have actually had to shut my watch down and restart it to remove them, but this is something that can easily be fixed in a software update. Give apple a break! This is a generation one product! Voice over will announce the contextual controls when they pop up on the screen, as well as give you audible indications of when your force touch is successful, and whenever a button pops up. Keep in mind, and it would maybe help if voice over gave an indication of this, multiple buttons may show themselves when you invoke this feature, and they will be arranged differently depending on where you are when you use it. SO for now, it’s up to you to depend on swiping, or memorizing where these buttons are. The next thing I want to talk about, and this is something that can be confusing to some users, is the digital crown. Look on the edges of the watch till you find a Nob. That is known as the digital crown. It’s used to zoom in and out, as well as scroll and change values. Most of the time, this does not directly impact voice over, but I have figured out uses for it. The first is on the home screen. This brings me to something that quite a few people I know have trouble. The home screen is not laid out in the predictable grid of the iPhone screen. I believe the best way to describe the app layout is as a blob. You can of course change the shape and layout of this blob, but when zoomed all the way out, it just looks like a pile of applications set on a black background. As I am sure some of you having figured out, when you navigate to the home screen, the clock will be at the center, and the other applications will be gathered around it. In this area, it’s easy to know where applications are, but because of the size of the screen, not all of them show at once. Also, you do not have the option of doing a three finger swipe from page to page, as the applications are arranged on all sides of the center of the clock. So instead of blindly swiping left or right, moving linearly along the rows of different lengths, turn the digital crown toward you just a little bit. No more than a quarter turn. What this does, is zooms out, making the hole blob of applications visible. While this makes the icons smaller, if you know in what area of the blog your application is in, you can find it, double tap on it, and the screen will zoom in on it, and you can enter the application that way. But if you don’t want to go through all that, just ask Siri to launch that app. Somethinf I will also briefly write on, is item pickers. When interacting with an item picker, instead of having to swipe over and over, turn the digital crown. voice over will actually announce the values as they change. you can move as fast or as slow as you want this way, without the constant swiping. Next, navigate into a message window, and open a message thread. You will notice you can swipe left and right with two fingers to move from message to message, and you can swipe up and down with two fingers to scroll, similar to the three finger swipe on the iPhone. Wow. This is turning into an instructional, rather than a persuasive, but o well, why not kill two birds with one stone. Anyway, do me a favor. In that same thread, do a two finger triple tap. I tried this at first to turn screen kerton on, but instead it does something entirely different, and all together cool in my opinion. It turns on a feature called crown navigation. You can use the crown to move around the display. A turn away from you is a left swipe, and a turn towards you is a right swipe. As you can most likely guess, this is useful when in lists, but not so much on screens like the home screen. Anyway, to turn it off, you can use the same command. Moving on from crown navigation, one bug I have found in message is that when entering a message thread, you always do not end up at the bottom of the thread. So if you single tap on the bottom of the screen and you do not see a reply button, simply scroll down with the apple watches digital crown by turning it away from you, and it will take you to the bottom. This is of course with crown navigation turned off. Sometimes voice over will give you an indication of this movement, sometimes it will not. Touching the screen every now and then will help you out in this. But in my observation, you never really have to scroll that far. Think about the scrolling motion of the crown in relation to the swipe. to scroll down, you do a gesture up. to scroll down, you turn the crown up. you get the point. So as you can see, until the software is optimized, the use of the devices is trial and error. If you want something that just works out of the box, with a small learning curve, and can do everything your iPhone can, this is not the device you want. If you want something experimental, with a mid-sized learning curve, something that you will have to actively take time to learn and something you will have to be patient with apple as they improve the softwea4r on, this is the device for you. The apple watch is something that communicates with you in a different way. When your iPhone sends you an alert, it’s kind of like, hey, iPhone here. You have an alert, I need you now. When your watch gives you that gentle tap on your wrist, it is saying, hey, you have an alert, but get to it when you can. Speaking of witch, I just got a tap from my watch. It’s telling me that I have been sitting on my butt too long, as is always the case with my job. So I am going to go walk around a bit. I hope you guys enjoy this little post, random as it may be.
P.S, if anyone is having an issue with the watch announcing the time when you lift your wrist or tap the display depending on your settings, force touch on the clock face, and do a two finger swipe left or right depending on what face you have set, and chose the color face. This tends to audo announce the time very well.