In the era of digital advancement, electronic devices have become an integral part of our lives. Among all smart devices, the iPad stands out for its exceptional performance, versatility, and portability. Apple has always been committed to enhancing the accessibility of its products and has integrated a variety of low vision accessibility features on the iPad, ensuring that each user can fully enjoy its convenience.
Key Functions for the Low Vision on iPad
As one of the best leading smart devices on the market, iPad offers a range of functions and accessibility features specifically designed to assist users with low vision. These functions and features aim to improve the independency and quality of visually impaired people’s life. With the vision accessibility on the iPad, low vision people are able to access more information and be more flexible and independent in their daily life. These key functions on iPad include:
Zoom:
The Zoom feature allows users to magnify the entire screen or a portion of it, making text, images, and icons larger and easier to see.
Large Text:
This feature increases the font size of the system text, making it more readable throughout the iPad’s interface for visually impaired people.
Bold Text:
By enabling Bold Text, the system font becomes bolder and more prominent, improving contrast and readability.
Invert Colors and Smart Invert:
Inverting colors can be beneficial for some users with low vision, especially those who are sensitive to color. The function changes the display’s color scheme, making it easier to read content.
Speak Screen:
The Speak Screen feature reads aloud the content displayed on the screen. This can be useful for those who prefer an auditory way of accessing information.
VoiceOver:
VoiceOver is a comprehensive screen reader that provides spoken feedback for all on-screen elements, and it’s a special function on iPad. It helps users navigate and interact with the iPad without relying on visual cues.
Dictation:
The iPad’s built-in dictation feature allows users to input text by speaking, making it easier to compose messages, emails, and notes without typing. For people with low vision, this function can help them study, work, or improve their social connections.
Touch Accommodations:
This feature allows users to adjust touch settings, such as touch duration and ignoring repeated touches, reducing accidental actions and improving touch accuracy. This function may seem unrelated to vision, but in fact, adjusting the touch accommodations can also reduce the chances of visually impaired individuals making errors while using an iPad.
There are actually more accessibility functions for low vision people on iPad. In some ways, these functions are suitable for most eye conditions, and people with eyesight loss can truly benefit from these functions to access the information on the Internet for many purposes. However, some people with visual impairments found the limitation and claimed that iPad still cannot fulfill their needs. They have been seeking some low vision aids to better utilize their iPads.
Low Vision Key Functions on Other Tablets
Thanks to the development of technology, besides iPad, tablets of other brands and systems also carry more and more vision accessibility functions to improve the user experiences for people who have visual impairments. Most functions are similar, but their purpose is to provide assistance to visually impaired individuals.
Customizable Text Size for Enhanced Readability:
The ability to adjust text size throughout the tablet’s interface is a paramount feature. By simply sliding the adjustment bar, low vision users can personalize the font size to suit their preferences and visual requirements. This customization promotes a comfortable reading experience, reducing eyestrain and ensuring content clarity.
Bold Text Presentation:
For those with visual impairments, distinguishing text from the background can be challenging. Bold Text functionality addresses this concern by rendering system text in a bolder fashion, elevating contrast and readability. This simple adjustment empowers users to absorb on-screen content with ease, alleviating frustration caused by faint text.
Magnification:
Nearly all tablets offer a screen magnification feature, allowing users to zoom in on the entire display or specific portions. This empowers low vision users to magnify text, images, and icons, enabling them to better comprehend content.
High Contrast Themes for Enhanced Visibility:
High contrast themes are a valuable addition to tablet accessibility features. By selecting a high contrast interface, users can experience heightened visibility, making text and interface elements more prominent and distinguishable.
Color Inversion:
Color inversion functionality is designed to reverse the colors displayed on the screen, offering increased contrast and making content stand out. Low vision users can utilize this feature to enhance content visibility and ease of reading.
Screen Readers:
Screen reader options are a game-changer for low vision users. Tablets equipped with screen readers provide audible feedback for on-screen elements, enabling users to navigate and interact with the device through auditory cues.
Voice Input:
Voice input capabilities transform tablets into user-friendly tools for low vision users. By employing speech-to-text technology, individuals can effortlessly compose messages, emails, and notes without relying on traditional typing.
Customizable Interface Elements:
Tablet accessibility extends to customizing interface elements, such as icons and buttons. Low vision users can adjust the size of these elements, facilitating more accurate and confident interactions.
Gesture Customization:
Gesture customization features enable users to personalize touch gestures, ensuring a smooth and efficient tablet experience tailored to their preferences.
As you may notice, the functions on iPad or other tablets are more or less similar. Choosing between these selections depends on many factors. The quality, the price, and whether the functions can be truly helpful for low vision people should all be taken into account. Nevertheless, as mentioned above, the vision accessibility features on the tablets might bring huge convenience for visually impaired individuals. On the other hand, all tablets are doing one thing, which is to improve their user experience, but not to provide an entire low-vision solution for visually impaired people.
Zoomax New Arrival – Snow Pad!
IPads, or other tablets with various systems, somehow make great progress in people’s daily life, and those vision accessibility functions also bring colossal convenience to people with low vision. Therefore, Zoomax took advantage of these tablets to develop a specific solution for visually impaired people, and the Snow Pad was born.
High-quality distance view camera:
Snow Pad can match multiple uses scenarios as it’s equipped with a camera to see clearly from 1 to 10 meters, which is perfect for use at school or the workplace. Meanwhile, Snow Pad possesses a split-screen design to satisfy distance and near view modes at the same time. With the split-screen design, students with low vision can take notes easily when looking at the content on the blackboard. The demonstration on the screen can always maintain high quality and lag-free even when moving the reading materials rapidly.
Portable external stand:
To maximize the use of Snow Pad, a portable external stand somehow is necessary to hold the tablet and the external camera. Although the camera on the tablets might be clear enough to see distant objects, however, holding the tablets to see far for a long time seems not a good option. The external stand of Snow Pad provides a solution for reading relaxingly and writing fluently, it not only carries an independent camera to achieve a clear distance-view but is also equipped with a magnetic area to place the tablet and make the near-view display stable and sharp. It’s also easy to fold and portable to carry, which can be ideal to use at school.
Functionality particularly for low vision:
The abundant built-in features that are friendly to low vision people of tablets have been discussed a lot in the above-mentioned sections. However, these features somehow remain scattered and may not fully meet the needs of visually impaired people. In contrast, the Snow Pad app is developed independently and tailored exclusively for people with low vision. From the designed icons to the overall functionality layout, every aspect of Snow Pad has been thoughtfully customized for those with visual impairments. The app especially focuses on incorporating functionalities relevant to low vision needs, offering an interface that is not only user-friendly but also satisfies their unique requirements.
In short, the combination of high-tech smart electronic products and professional low vision assisting technology makes it easier for people with low vision to control smart products, and at the same time enjoy other conveniences brought by smart products themselves. This is a new trend, and it is also the demand of many low-vision people who want to continue using smart products. Snow Pad is trying to bring revolutionary features to expand the boundaries of low vision aids and provide more simplicity and practicality for low vision people. It is expected to be launched in the fourth quarter of this year, and the technical specifications and specific functions will be continuously updated on the official website of Zoomax. Please keep an eye on the Zoomax website for further updates or contact us for more information about Snow Pad.
