After unlocking your device, you would be taken to the home screen. Let’s see how does it look like.
The Home Screen is divided into four sections, namely, the status bar, the application grid, the Page adjustment and the doc. All these sections have same width and placed one over another
Like the Lock Screen, the topmost section is the status bar, here you can find the time and status of various modules and background processes of your device as described in the in earlier post here: http://beyondinvisible.tk/traversing-iphone-ipad-lock-screen-through-voice-over/
Just beneath the status bar, there is the Application Grid region that constitutes the main part of the home screen as it contains all the installed apps in the form of grid. In case of iPhone 4S, this app icons are arranged in a grid of four rows and four columns. The size of app icon is just comparable to the size of the button on your shirt. The name of the app is written just below the app icon, this gives the rectangular shape despite of equal numbers of rows and columns.
As the structure of the application grid region has become familiar, you can find the first icon at the left most corner just below the status bar. Once you have found the first icon, you can explore other icons by sliding your finger to grasp what’s under it, or by simply navigating using left or right swipe to move to next or previous icon. Double tapping the highlighted icon would open the respective app. Usage of some basic apps has been described later.
Now, if you keep on swiping right from the last icon of the application grid, you will enter into the page adjustment region. This is also a very small region just like the status bar barely half of the centimeter in length. This region allows you to adjust the page. As discussed above, there would be a maximum of 16 apps in the application region. If the number of apps exceeds the capacity of the grid, the app gets placed on the next page of the application grid region and so on, depending upon the number of apps you have installed, the pages in the application grid region would be added.
To toggle the page, you have to place the cursor on the page control region and swipe up to move to next page and swipe down to move to prior page. Alternatively you can swipe left to right with three fingers to move to next page and vice versa.
After the page control region, there comes dock region. This region contains a group of most commonly used apps. In case of iPhone 4S, this region contains 4 apps, namely phone, mail, safari, and music. The number can vary depending upon the size of the device. You can also change the apps in the dock region. As this region is fixed, changing the pages of application grid won’t affect the dock, which makes it quite easy to access frequently used apps.
Points to conclude
1. Here also, try to figure out the relative positions of various app icons by exploring the entire screen with your finger.
2. Try to understand various sound feedback produced in different situations such as while adjusting the page from the page adjustment region and when you have reached to the boundary or last or first item of some section. These sounds becomes quite useful as you start exploring more.
3. Basically there are three distinct sounds which are used to indicate:
1. Movement of cursor from one item to another.
2. Boundaries of a particular section.
3. Opening an app.
Some other sounds would be introduced later as they come across.
I am pretty sure, you now have a good view of the homescreen of your device. Feel fre to connect.
This guide was originally posted on http://beyondinvisible.tk