 Hello, everyone. My name is David Kotman. I'm an accessibility tester with Nels. And today, I'm going to talk about some of the challenges that people with low vision face while reading and look at some of the solutions and also look at some of the software and hardware that can help with that, some of the assistive technology. Low vision can be caused by many things. You could have macular degeneration, dyslexia, cataracts, different congenital conditions that come later in life or early in life, sometimes by illness or injury. All kinds of things can cause low vision. And the way it manifests itself is sometimes difficult to understand on an individual basis because perception is involved. So what one person sees while looking at a certain view, the other person would see something different often. And that's because the brain is involved in perception. And it does interpretation. And also, we learn different strategies for dealing with our low vision. In my case, for example, when I walk down the street to make sure I see what's coming in front of me, I tend to turn my head sideways. I'm not even aware of that anymore. So we don't always exactly know what somebody's experiencing. But we do know that, in fact, you will have blurriness, lack of visual acuity. It could be colorblind. There could be glare. There could be spaces that are unusual and throw you off when you're looking at letters. Large spaces, small spaces, all kinds of things can manifest in low vision. In my case, my condition is a form of star guard disease. It's a central vision degeneration, a macular degeneration. And it causes me to not be able to see things right in the center of my vision. And when you're reading, that means the one or two or three letters that you're really looking at all the time are the one word. So that's what happens. And I generally have to use a magnification on the software I use, Zoom text, at about two, two and a half times. I also make color enhancements. And some of those color enhancements mean flipping the screen from white on black, or rather to actually black on white, which you normally see on the print page, to white on black. That cuts glare and increases contrast. Other people will use different color schemes. They find that too harsh. So they'll use a blue or a yellow instead of a white on black. But applications like Zoom text will allow you to do these things. And it's a great application. We're going to take a look at that today. We'll also look at some of the challenges that can be overcome by using a couple of different software, as I mentioned, Zoom text. But also I'm going to look at iOS, which is the native operating system on Apple devices. And that has a built-in, a very excellent built-in accessibility features. And we'll be looking at that on my iPad today after we go through some websites first using Zoom text on my PC. So we'll get right into that. And I hope that you enjoy it. And it's informative and useful for you. Thank you. OK, so we're going to look at using the PC with Zoom text. And I want to point out a couple of things quickly first. Is that I apologize for some of the fuzziness and perhaps the glare on the monitor. I did try to use two-clone monitors and some glitches with Zoom text would not allow me to do that, so I had to move to some older technology. So I'm sorry about that. And I want to point out that not everyone who uses Zoom text has the equal amount of technical savvy, you might say. There's a whole range, of course, in people. And if you're not able to set up some of these hotkeys in a way that makes it really fast, it could be more cumbersome. So keep that in mind when I show you some of these things. But certainly Zoom text, you would need Zoom text for working and doing more concentrated things on your PC. The Windows accessibility software is not bad, but certainly not flexible enough to do a lot of work and whatnot. So I'm going to look at a few different websites. Here's the Zoom text interface that will go into the background when I work in other things. But you can see here I am, no magnification. Here we are at two where I normally work. OK, the first thing I want to look at is a site, as a page, rather on UPS. And I did a demonstration some years ago of this. And I think they've made some changes, which I will show you here. There is what the normal page would look like. Here it is with the way I look at it. These now have links. You can see there's a line under them to scroll over them. But they didn't have links, I think, in the past and when I was doing this demonstration a couple of years ago. But here's the problem with this. When I have a magnification, say, of about two or a little larger, I'll look around and I'll go. And I may not even notice these. I know I did flip over there for a second a minute ago. But I might not even notice these arrows. And when there isn't any link here, and there wasn't, and I've seen on other websites where they have it set up like this, there's no often no reason why you would go over to the edge of the page. And you'd go, oh, what do I do? What are these? So it can be helpful to either have some sort of indication that something at the end of the page, like little dots, or just simply move those in. There's no need to have them out that far. OK, now I'm working with this full screen. But so if I made the screen smaller, it'd be a little different. But that's one of the issues that you see on many websites. And sometimes you'll see a little circle down here or something so you can go in a chat with somebody from the company or whatever. And often it's mixed, absolutely missed. And this is a feedback thing that doesn't show well on the monitor, I think, but that's also can be an issue. And I'll go on ABC News. And I apologize for whatever the headlines are. They might not be the most pleasant. What I do want to show you is that you'll see at the top here, along here, and it did turn on. Apologize for that. These videos start automatically on some of these websites. You have the menu labels here, which are fine. They happen to be all in caps. But they're fine and they're easy to read. Even the Dell ad is easy to read. But when you go into the body of the story, it's all in serif fonts. And you can't make any adjustments in websites like this. So it's very difficult to read. I don't know why they do it. And there will be other times. You'll see down here where they actually switch back to sans serif fonts, which are much easier to read than they use for these headlines, et cetera. Here they do, here they do, here they do, here they do. So this can be a real problem, especially when there's no adjustment for it. And I noticed on the CBC site, they use sans serif fonts. But occasionally, they'll use headlines that are bold, and they start to, the letters start to blend together because there's not as much spacing between them. And I want to show you one more here. This is a San Francisco public library. And when you look at this, you might instinctively say, hmm, that could be a problem. OK, there it's what it looks like with no screen enhancements or enlargement. But here we have a pretty small type, white on blue, not the darkest blue, but not bad. But to look at it, I will bring it up and read it like that. Not too bad. But then you have it switching here to dark on a light gray. And then you have the background coming down. If it's any smaller, it's even harder to read. There it's changing on me, changing on me. This isn't so bad. This is white on dark, but it does change when you touch it. But what you'll see is as you go further down. Oh, well now we've got a dark print on a light background. So in order to do anything with that, I've got to go into it like that, enlarge it, have a look at it, and I'll scroll down. And this isn't too bad here. That's not bad. But here we go again, another change. And even though I'm quite large, it's not the easiest to read. So I might go back and do that again. But we go further down, and here we go again. Another shift back. And these are quite small. And if you see this, there's no hardly any contrast. And these little things, and if I scroll up, it starts to pixelate and gets even harder to see. So just back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. Here we go again. Here we go again. All kinds of just back and forth, lack of contrast, back and forth, back and forth. So some things to keep in mind. Is it important for the design? That's perhaps subjective. But could it be better for accessibility? Certainly can. That was a bit of demonstration of ZoomText used on my PC with a web browser. Now there are some reading applications that I use on my PC like Thorium, which is excellent. And it has incredible ability to make all kinds of adjustments to fonts and spacing and all kinds of wonderful things. But ZoomText has some glitches, which are acknowledged by the company. So I was unable to do that on my PC today. But next, we're going to look at a number of applications for reading, for listening to books, and reading magazines and some library apps on iOS. And I will be able to show you those adjustments in some of the iOS apps. Now we're going to look at the iPad. And first, we're going to start with Apple Books, which is a pretty good app. It's pretty easy to use. I like the way it scrolls through pages. There we go. Pretty easy. You can tap or you can swipe with your finger. It's pretty nice. Now there's a bar at the bottom here in which you can move through the pages quickly back and forth. It's gone now. But when you tap on it, it comes back. And you can see it's quite small, a little hard to find. But I can find it. And you'll see you can move through pages right from front to back very quickly or back to the beginning of the book. OK. Not bad. Some of the information at the bottom is quite small, as are the icons at the top. So you see, for me, to actually read that this is something about pages is difficult. But here I go. I can see that now back to page 1159. And it shows you where you are. But I really do have to enlarge that quite a bit. To be able to see it, there are some adjustments. There are font adjustments and brightness adjustments. You can make the font quite large. If you had to, you could turn the page sideways and read it that way, which would help. If you need to have very large fonts. Whoops, I'll open that again. I'll just bring this down a little bit. Oh, too about there. So that will give you, you'll see, a good reading space. And because it's reflowable, it will fit the page no matter how big you make the fonts or small. And then we go back and it still fits the page nicely. The bookmarks and search icons are small, but you do get used to them and knowing where they are, because there's not too many of them, but they are quite small. And sometimes, if I need to remind myself, I have to blow it up to take a look. Be nice if those were larger. Here's the menu, the table of contents, not bad. Sometimes I need to enlarge that. But it's not too bad. So Apple Books, pretty straightforward, generally easy to use, but has some of the problems of small icons that most of the different applications on iOS have. There we go. And you'll see that there are links to the different chapters, which are easy to use, right, from the table of contents at the beginning, which you can go back like that. Now, this little area in the bottom that has writing is in the reverse order in terms of white on black, black and white, and that becomes hard to read. So I kind of can't use that as I'm moving along. Now, I want to show you or be digital. And this is what I'm using for reading magazines. Again, not good contrast on the menu on the left. I can change it over, but it's quite small, but it is possible to use. But it is going back and forth a lot because the rest of it, as you see, is white on black as below the magazine. So it changes back and forth. OK, it's not being that responsive for me. I want to read this. There we go. When I open the magazine, you'll see that right now I have in what's called text mode. And I'm going to reverse, which is pretty good. Now, unfortunately, in this application, I don't believe you can go, whoops, that just brings up the picture by itself. So I think some of these extra little features sometimes actually make it more complicated. But you have to tap on it. And then down here, that's where you go from text mode. And then you can change the font. But I think we're pretty much at the largest font now, which is a problem. You can change brightness. There are some themes for different color backgrounds, et cetera. But that's it. That's the largest font. I can take it into a horizontal mode. May help a little bit, but not that much. So I'm going to actually have to be doing this to read it and scroll back and forth. But the text mode is helpful because if you're not in text mode, it's more like a PDF. So you're in the actual regular magazine mode. And that's almost impossible. You'd have to go like this and read it like this. Read each one. And then you'd kind of be hard to know where you are on the page and what page you're on. So the text mode is a real bonus. Put it back in text mode. But it has its limitations, too. OK? And the last one I want to look at is our two-reader. And I believe this is made by the same people as Thorium, but it has a lot more adjustments. And it is easier to use. So I'm going to open a book here. And you'll see right away that the fonts are larger and the spacing between the letters is better. If we go into the menu again, the icons at the top are small, but if we go into the menu, you'll see that I'm on one of the larger fonts. And that is about the largest. But it's not bad. And here we can go to some smaller ones. But one of the nice things, oh, and there is the font. There's different font choices. And I've chosen this one because it's sans serif. There's an open dyslexic font for people with dyslexia, which changes the spacing to make it easier for them to read. But one of the nice features of this, and I'll show you this, is I want to show you the advanced features. Go back for font selection. Here we go. Advanced settings. And in here, you'll see some great things. You can change the way it displays in terms of whether it's justified, whether it's aligned left. You can change the page margins to the actual line height between the lines, the word spacing, the letter spacing, lots of different options for making it more readable for people with all kinds of different print disabilities. That makes it a real great app. Still some, of course, small page numbers at the bottom. And if you want to have a look up, you have to bounce back and forth a bit. A menu, a table of contents, not too bad, a little bit small, doesn't come up to quite the size of the table of contents, but usable. As you see, you can easily jump from spot to spot from there. Again, these buttons at top for context bookmarks, your page list, and landmarks is kind of small. And if you open it up, actually, I don't have any bookmarks in there right now. But you can see I'm struggling a little bit with these. There we go, landmarks, bookmarks. You can see the size that they're going to be. They'll be within these lines. And they're going to be relatively small. But overall, a pretty good app. And if you go into horizontal mode, because it's reflowable and fits the page, not bad for reading. I hope you enjoyed the presentation. And I hope that it was helpful and informative. Thank you so much for listening. It's been a pleasure. Stay safe and stay healthy.