 Hey everybody. What's up? It's Rob Dutson. Welcome back to the Alicast Show. Today we're going to be continuing our series on assistive technology by looking at switch devices. So a switch device is for anybody who's got limited dexterity or limited range of motion. Probably one of the most famous switch device users in the world is Stephen Hawking. And what we're going to be doing today is showing how you can use a switch device to interact with a mobile device, in particular Android. So the device I've got with me today, this is the Bluetooth by AbleNet. This is a Bluetooth enabled switch. It's got two switches that are available on it. And if we go into our accessibility settings on our phone, we can go down to where it says switch access, make sure our device is turned on, go into settings, and we can assign actions to these switches. So I'm going to go over where it says assign switches for scanning and for select, which is, you know, like I want to do a mouse click essentially, I can click on that. And in this case, I've actually already mapped that action to this yellow button right here. But if you don't have a switch device, you can still test this on your phone by using the volume keys. So for instance, I can use the volume down key on my phone and assign that as a switch as well. Then you've got next and previous actions. Since I only have like one or two volume keys, I'm going to use the only the next action and I'll assign that to this other volume key. Right. And then we can actually skip using the previous action. We don't need to worry about that for now. We'll just use next to kind of jump around the page and use select to click on things. So next let's switch over to Chrome. And what I've got here is a little website that I've created called lifestyle. This is sort of like a little Pinterest clone. And what I want to demonstrate is how we can do some basic navigation on this page. So I'm going to use the switch in this case, or you can use the volume keys. And the first thing we're going to do is we're going to start scanning. There's a few different kinds of scanning modes that switch devices make available to folks. There's auto scanning. So in that case, the device itself will actually do some scanning for you. And then you just click the switch to interact with something. And then there's different kinds of like, you know, row versus column versus group scanning. What we're going to do here is just a really simple manual scan. So we'll just go item by item through all the interactive controls. So I start by hitting the switch. The first thing it does actually is it shows this menu option and we'll come back to this in just a sec. Then it lets us go through the Chrome of the browser itself. And then it jumps into the page. And then we can actually go through and look at the different interactive elements. So in this case, lifestyle itself, this text here is an anchor. If we go to the shopping bag, that takes us to like our checkout page, that's also interactive. So that's an anchor as well. And then the image and the heading for our article, that is an anchor as well. So if you've watched this series for a while, you know, we often talk about using the keyboard to navigate through interactive controls. And what you're seeing here is basically the same thing when you're working with a switch device, right? We're landing on all the interactive elements and we want, we can go ahead and click this other button here to interact with one of them. So in this case, I can click that button to click on this article. Now there's not a real article on the end of here. I've just put like a little placeholder page here, but that's basically, you know, the gist of it. You can navigate using some linear scanning and then click on a control. Now the next thing you might wonder is, well, if I've only got these like two buttons, how exactly am I supposed to scroll the page? So what we can do here is we can go through and can start scanning and you'll see that there is a point where the entire page is highlighted. And if we click on our switch at this point, it'll actually give us some options to either scroll forward or scroll backward, right? So pretty straightforward. They'll keep in mind, right? Like it's, it's a fair bit of work to scroll to navigate through all the different controls and then to finally hit a button to interact with it. And so this is why we often encourage folks, you know, if you're, if you're, you know, building a shopping card or anything like that where you've got some like primary action buttons to put those high up on the page to make those early in the tab order. So that way it's really efficient for everybody who's using a keyboard or in this case a switch device to access that content. Okay. So if you remember in some of our episodes on screen readers, I was showing off some, you know, kind of common pitfalls and gotchas that we see when using assistive technology in particular on like responsive websites. So let's look at an example of that. So this is the same page that we've looked at before with screen readers. This is our little responsive website. You can see here, we've got this hamburger menu. We open it up. We've got a bunch of anchors here and things that are off screen usually. And in this case, those anchors and everything, they're not displayed, none. They're not visibly hidden. They don't have tab index, negative one on anything. So they are entirely in the DOM. They are entirely interactive. And you'll see that as I'm navigating using my switch, there comes a point where even though it's not on screen, we're actually focusing the content of that side nav. And I'll go through and you can see it's trying to select the different regions in the side nav. And I'll go sort of like item by item and look for those different anchors. So again, the trick here is if you have stuff that's off screen, you really want to make sure that you're making it display none or setting it to visibility hidden. So it's no longer in the tab order. It's no longer focusable because for someone who is using a switch device, it might be, you know, time consuming or tedious or challenging for them to have to hit it over and over and over again. So you want to remove those impediments and make sure that they're having a really good efficient experience. Now, the last thing I want to show you is how someone interacts with unique controls like this slider down here, because I think this is actually just like super cool. So, um, switch devices on, on Android and on iOS have the ability to do kind of like a virtual mouse click. And so what we're going to do is we're going to go back to this menu button. We'll click on that. We'll go down to where it says point scan. And then watch what is going to happen here because it's going to try and do this kind of like cool animated crosshair thing. We're going to interact with it. So as soon as I hit the button, you'll go, we have this like vertical scanning line. So we wait till we get down to our slider control. We click and have a horizontal line. We click and that actually moves the control over. So that's kind of cool, right? If someone's using a switch device, though it might be a little time consuming, they are still able to do essentially like a simulated mouse click, which I just think is like pretty fascinating. Now today we've covered how switch devices work basically on Android and how switch access works there. If you're interested in learning how switch controls work on iOS, I'm going to include some links down in the show note to a YouTuber named Christopher Hill's videos. He is a switch device user who predominantly uses Mac OS and iOS. So you can go check out his channel. He's got a ton of videos that show how he uses his switch with his laptop, with his iPad, how he like makes music and plays games and does all this other cool stuff. So definitely go check out those videos. Otherwise, that about covers it for today. So if you have any questions, as always, you can leave them down below in the comments or hit me up on a social network of your choosing. As always, thank you so much for watching and I'll see you next time.