iPhone/iPad VoiceOver: Search the Web

Hello, my name is Douglas Walker. Today we are going to be searching the web, and we will be using Safari to perform our search.

Now Safari is Apple's built-in web browser, and we use a web browser for browsing or searching for information on the internet. We already have Safari open, and we have been placed right back in the last webpage that we had open here.

Now our address bar or search bar is what we will use to perform our web search. And we will find our web address bar at the very top of our screen. I tell ya, Apple has made things super simple. We can actually type in our web addresses and perform our searches right in the same place. So how about we go ahead and move to our address bar here? We'll just go ahead and touch our address bar.

VoiceOver: Address Google.com secure and validated connection. Double tap to show controls.

Douglas: Great, we heard our voiceover announce our web address. However, we were also told that we could double tap to show our controls. And this is great because these are the controls that we will use for searching the web. So we'll go ahead and just double tap here.

VoiceOver: Address address text field is editing. Https://www.google.com selected.

Douglas: All right, our search edit field is ready for typing and we have been given a standard keyboard here at the bottom of our screen that we can use for entering our search keywords. So we are good to go. You know, how about we search for information for one of the most common eye conditions? Let's look up macular degeneration here which just so happens to be the eye condition that I have, so we'll go ahead and just type in macular degeneration.

VoiceOver: M, M, selection, A, X, C, C, U, U, L, L, Shift, A, A, R, R, space space. Macular D, D, E, E, F, G, G, E, E, N, N, E, E, R, R, A, A, T, T, I, I, O, O, N, N.

Douglas: Okay so we have typed our two search keywords and we are ready to perform our search. Okay we've been given a go button in the bottom right corner of our on-screen keyboard here. And we will double tap our go button to begin our web search so we'll go ahead and just touch our go button here.

VoiceOver: Go.

Douglas: Great, and there it is. So we will just double tap here.

VoiceOver: Go. Webpage loaded, Google link.

Douglas: Great, our web search has been performed. Now Google is set up as our default search engine for Safari. So we have actually performed a Google web search, and we have been placed right in our Google search results page. Now we could just begin right swiping through our search results screen here and that would be fine if we wanted to check out everything on our screen.

However, there are quite a few redundant links at the very top of our screen that we're probably going to want to skip, so it's great to know that Google lists all of the search results here by headings. And of course we could use our rotor to move by headings. So we'll go ahead and just choose our headings element in our rotor here. We'll go ahead and find our headings here.

VoiceOver: Braille, screen, language, hints, volume, speaking rate, lines, words, characters, edit, form control, links, headings. 37 headings.

Douglas: Okay, we heard VoiceOver announce headings, and we were told that we have 37 headings on our search results page here. Okay so now that our headings are selected, we know that each time we swipe down our screen, we will move to our next heading. So how about we just go ahead and swipe down a few times here and we'll just explore our search results and we'll just swipe down a couple of times here.

VoiceOver: Search modes, heading level one.

Douglas: Here's our search modes here. We'll just swipe down again.

VoiceOver: Ads, heading level one, ads, region, landmark.

Douglas: Here's the landmark that's our ads here. Let's swipe down one more time, see what we have here.

VoiceOver: Get the facts about Wet AMD, learn more about treatment, heading level three, link.

Douglas: Yeah, and here's a heading that's talking about Wet AMD or the wet age related macular degeneration. And this sounds interesting so let's go ahead and just double tap and we'll check out our information here. So we'll just double tap.

VoiceOver: Get the facts about Wet AMD, learn more about treatment, heading level three, link.

Douglas: Great, our webpage with information on age related macular degeneration has opened, and we have been placed right at the top of our screen. And we could simply just begin right swiping through our screen here to check it all out. And there you go. We have performed our first web search.

Now, if for some reason, we wanted to move back to our Google search results screen, well, we could just double tap our back button here in the bottom left corner of our screen. And we would be placed right back in our macular degeneration search results. Maybe if we decide that we want to perform a brand new web search, we can just double tap back in our address bar again. Of course that's here in the top center of our screen, and we could simply just type in some new keywords if we like. And there you go.

That pretty much covers the basics of how to perform a web search. And like anything else, searching the web might take a little practice at first, but before we know it, we'll soon be searching the web with ease. Again, my name is Douglas Walker. Take care and I'll see ya next time.