Apple TV: Low Vision Accessibility

Hello. My name is Douglas Walker. Today we will be checking out our low vision features that are built right into our Apple TV. It really is fantastic that our vision accessibility features for Apple products are built right into our device because this means that we don't need to purchase any third-party software in order to make our device fully accessible. I tell you, that is pretty great.

Now our accessibility settings can be found within our settings app. Our settings app is right here on our home screen, so we'll go ahead and flick to it. We'll flick to it here and we'll activate it to bring up our settings menu. We'll just press to activate. Okay, our settings app has opened and we've been presented with a list with all of our Apple TV settings.

Now we you need to navigate to our accessibility settings to find all of our vision settings, and our accessibility settings are under our general settings. Our general settings are already highlighted right here at the very top of our list, so we'll just press our touch surface here and open them up. We'll just press ... Great. Our general settings have opened. So we'll just swipe down until we find our accessibility button. We'll just flick down a few times here. All right, and here we are on accessibility and so we'll just press it here to open it up. We'll press ...

Yeah. Here we are in all of our accessibility settings. We'll just go ahead and flick down until we find all of our low vision settings. We just flick down until we find zoom here.

All right. Here is our zoom button. Now zoom is actually our magnification software. Now we aren't going to be covering zoom in today's video because we just so happen to have an Apple TV video called "Apple TV Using Zoom Magnification" and it does a pretty good job quickly getting us up and running with all that our zoom magnification feature has offer.

Now just below our zoom feature we have our display accommodations settings. Now our display accommodations really do give us a lot of control over all of our devices' color settings, as well as our background contrast. So we'll just press on our display accommodation settings. First we'll flick down here to it and then we'll just press display accommodations here. Great. Our display accommodations have all opened for us and we've been placed on our color filters button. Let's go ahead and just activate our color filters button to check all out here. We'll just press color filters.

Okay. Our color filters have all opened. As we can see, they're currently turned off so let's just press them here to turn them on. We'll just press ... Okay. Our color filters are now on so we can just flick through these and check them out. We just flick down to the bottom. A lot of choices here. We'll flick back up a couple of times. Yeah, we can choose here between some really great filters here. We'll kind of have to experiment with our color filters to adjust our Apple TV so that it works just right for us. However, we're just flick all the way back up and turn off our color filters for now. We'll just press to turn off here.

Okay. Our color filters, of course, are now off and we'll just head back to our display accommodations list by activating our menu button here. We'll just press our menu button. Okay. Our button just below our color filters button is our light sensitivity button. We'll just flick down here and we'll flick the light sensitivity, and here we are. We'll just touch surface and we'll open up our light sensitivity here.

Okay. Light sensitivity is currently turned off. Turning off our light sensitivity will kind of dim our screen. This can really help to reduce some of our screen glare, so we'll just press to turn it on here. We'll just press ... Yeah. We notice that our screen has kind of dimmed a bit, which can really help to reduce glare for some users. Now our color intensity all stays the same, which is really great. Now just below this we've also been give here the ability to adjust the intensity of our light sensitivity. That can be super handy for us.

Okay. We'll go ahead and just flick back up and we'll turn our light sensitivity back off here. We'll just press ... Okay. We'll just press our menu button here to return to our display accommodations menu. We'll just press here ... Great. Our next vision accessibility feature here is our reduce white point button. We just flick down here ...

Yeah. Our reduce white point is currently turned off so we'll press our touch surface to open our reduce white point settings here. We'll just go ahead and press it here.

All right. Our reduce white point settings, they look very much like our light sensitivity settings. We can simply press here to turn it on. We'll do that. We'll just press ...

Yeah. We can already see that our screen has dimmed quite a bit and we no longer have that bright white background, which is really nice. However, this will also help to reduce the brightness of really bright colors as well. We also have an intensity button as well for totally controlling our screen's white point.

All right. We'll flick back up here and we'll just press to turn our reduce white point back off. We'll just press it here ... Yeah. Our screen is no longer dimmed so we'll just press our menu button to move back to our display accommodations setting. We'll just press our menu ... Great. We'll just press our menu button again to navigate back to all of our accessibility settings. We'll just press ... Great. We're back in our main accessibility settings list.

The next item in our list is our bold text feature. We'll just flick down to get to bold text here. All right. Here's our bold text button. Now this is a feature that we already have turned on. We know how Apple loves to use those really thin fonts, and our bold text feature really helps to make our thin fonts so much easier to see.

All right. When we first turn this feature on, a dialog screen will appear. Our dialog is going to state that applying our bold text setting will restart our Apple TV. Okay. If we press to continue this our Apple TV, of course, will restart and our new bold text setting will be applied. As we can see, it really makes a huge difference in the thickness of our text size here.

Let's go ahead and move on to our next feature over here. We'll just flick down and we'll flick down. Now our next feature here is our increase contrast feature. As visually appealing as Apple TV is, with its transparent backgrounds and kind of muted colors, it really gives some of those low vision users quite a bit of difficulty at determining what is our background and what is our relevant text. Our increase contrast feature will give us a nice bold background that's going to screen's text so much easier to see, so let's just press to open up our increase contrast here. We just press ... Okay. We have a couple of settings here and we have been placed on a reduce transparency button. We'll simply press to turn it on here. We'll just press ...

Now all of our transparent backgrounds are going to appear solid - a solid background - which, I tell you, is really helpful in reducing visual clutter for us.

Okay. We'll flick down to our next setting here. We'll just flick down ... Okay. This is kind of cool. This is our focus style setting. We'll just press to open it up here. We'll press it here ...

Now we're given another dialog here that lets us choose between our default focus style and a high contrast focus style. Now we can probably see that our text here kind of has a blur to it, or kind of a fuzzy edge to it. Well choosing high contrast is going to take away this blur and it's going to give our text, really, a sharp edge to it. We'll go ahead and just flick down to high contrast to check it out. We'll just flick down and we'll just press our touch surface here to turn it on. We'll just press ... Great. We can see here that all of our text is much more defined, or clear, for us and this is really great.

Okay. We'll just go ahead and press our menu button and we'll move back to our main accessibility menu here, and we'll check out our last low vision feature here. We'll just press ...

Right. Here we are, back in our list. We'll just flick down here ... We'll flick down ... Okay. This is our last low vision setting and this is our reduced motion feature.

Now we all know how Apple loves to have different motion effects. These typically occur when we activate or close any of our applications. Our items will kind of fly into place across our background and our app icons will actually appear to hover above our background. This can be really cool. However it can, at times, be very visually confusing so Apple has been kind enough to give us a way to turn our motion features off. We can do this by activating our reduced motion feature here. We'll just press our reduced motion button here. We'll do that, we'll press ... Great. Of course, that was super easy. Our reduced motion is now on, and there you go. I tell you, I really love that we have the ability to reduce the motion of items on our screen.

Okay. That pretty much covers all of our low vision accessibility features. As we can see, we've been given a ton of features here. It's really great to know just how far Apple has gone to make it possible for us to be able to totally customize our Apple TV so that it works just right for us.

Again, my name is Douglas Walker. Take care and I'll see you next time.