Low Vision Features

Hi, I am Vikki Vaughan and in today's workshop we'll explore several low vision features that are built into our Amazon Fire TV Stick. We'll learn how to turn on the magnifier and text banner. These low vision features help make moving around our Amazon Fire TV stick environment a little easier. We'll have voice view our screen reader turned on for this workshop. If you prefer to not have your Amazon Fire TV Stick speak, you can leave Voice View turned off. When we turn on the Amazon Fire TV Stick, we land in the main menu.

We'll jump right into our first low vision feature, the magnifier. We'll use a handy shortcut on our remote. Let's hold down the back button and the fast forward button for two to three seconds. The back button is the far left button in the top row below the directional pad. The fast forward button is the far right button in the second row below the directional pad

- [Voice Assistant] Screen magnifier.

- [Vikki] We'll start off with a tutorial for the magnifier. Here we see a list of button combinations on our remote that we can use to zoom in or out, as well as move around our screen. At the bottom of our list, we find two controls. We land on the turn off magnifier icon. Let's press the right button on our remote to move to okay.

- [Voice Assistant] Okay button.

- [Vikki] We'll then press the select button to turn on the magnifier

- [Voice Assistant] Home. Four of 13.

- [Vikki] We've landed back on our home screen. This is a good time to mention that while it's possible to zoom in while watching movies and TV shows, some of us find the fact that we can only see a portion of our screen not as enjoyable. Where the magnification feature really comes in handy is when we're reading menus, notifications, and other text. Let's zoom in by holding down the menu button and pressing the fast forward button. With each press of the fast forward button, we zoom in a little more. If we want to zoom out, we hold down the menu button and press the rewind button. In the top right corner of our screen, we see a visual indicator that stays up for just a moment. This indicator lets us know which part of the screen is magnified. It doesn't stay visible for very long, but it reappears whenever we zoom in or out.

We move around our screen by holding down our menu button and using the directional button on the circular pad at the top of our remote. We move up by holding down the menu button and pressing the up button on our directional pad. To move down, once again, we hold down the menu button and press the down button on the pad. To move to the right, we hold down the menu button and press the right button on our pad, and when we want to move left, you guessed it, we hold down the menu button and press the left button on the pad. Whenever we press the buttons on the directional pad by themselves, our selection moves and our magnified window follows the selection. Let's try it out by moving to our settings icon. We're currently on the home icon. It's worth mentioning that there are several different models of the Amazon Fire TV Stick. If your menu looks a little different than mine, it's possible that we have different models. We'll press the right button repeatedly until we land on settings. Once we land on settings, let's press the select button to open these options.

- [Voice Assistant] Netflix, Prime video, YouTube, News. More apps, settings, settings, notifications. Row one, column one. Use left and right to move between items.

- [Vikki] We land on the first settings option, notifications. All of the options under settings are laid out in a grid. Let's press our down button twice to move to the bottom row.

- [Voice Assistant] Preferences. Row three, column one.

- [Vikki] Then we'll press the right button twice to move to accessibility.

- [Voice Assistant] Accessibility. Row three, column three.

- [Vikki] Now we'll press the select button to open our accessibility menu.

- [Voice Assistant] Accessibility, closed caption. One of eight. Use up and down to move between items.

- [Vikki] We've landed on the first option in the accessibility menu, closed caption. Let's use our down button to move to screen magnifier

- [Voice Assistant] Alexa, voice, text, screen magnifier on. Five of eight.

- [Vikki] We see that it's turned on. It's nice to know. We have a couple of ways to turn our magnifier on and off. We can use the button combination on our remote, or we can select the screen magnifier option in our accessibility menu

- [Voice Assistant] Off.

- [Vikki] While we're here, let's check out a couple of other low vision features. We'll use the up button on our remote to move to text banner.

- [Voice Assistant] Text banner. Four of eight.

- [Vikki] The text banner feature is designed for those of us with a narrow field of vision. It condenses onscreen text into a compact banner that appears in a fixed location on the screen. This feature can really come in handy when we have lots of text across the entire screen. Let's turn on the text banner by pressing the select button

- [Voice Assistant] Text banner tutorial.

- [Vikki] A new window pops up with a tutorial for using button combinations on our remote. Just like with our magnifier, we find two controls at the bottom of the window. Turn off and okay. Let's press the right button to move to okay. Then press the select button to turn it on.

- [Voice Assistant] Text banner, text banner on. One of five.

- [Vikki] We're now in our text banner menu. Here we can change the font size and color, the banner size and timing, open the tutorial and return all of the settings to default. If you'd like to explore the text banner in detail, be sure to check out the resources below this workshop. Just like with our magnifier, we can turn the text banner on and off with a button combination on our remote or here in our accessibility settings.

On our remote, we press the rewind and fast forward buttons together for two seconds to open the text banner. If there's more text than fits in the banner, we press the rewind or fast forward buttons to move back and forth through the text. When we're ready to use our rewind and fast forward buttons in their normal fashion, we hide the banner with a long press of the play pause button. If we want to unhide the banner, we use that same button shortcut. For now, let's turn off the text banner by pressing the rewind and fast forward buttons together.

- [Voice Assistant] Text banner off one of one.

- [Vikki] In today's workshop, we explored several low vision features in the Amazon Fire TV Stick. I'm Vikki Vaughan and I thank you for joining me.