iPhone/iPad VoiceOver: Typing

Hello, my name's Douglas Walker. Today we will be checking out how to type using our on-screen keyboard. This is something that can be a bit intimidating when we first take our device out of the box. Then we're faced with the task of typing on a piece of glass. However, just like anything else, with practice and a few tips, we will be amazed at just how fast we'll be typing.

A great place to practice our typing is within our notes app. We just so happen to have a new note open. We have been given a standard on-screen keyboard right here in the bottom of our screen. It really helps to be familiar with the layout of a standard keyboard before we begin. Otherwise we will be doing a lot of hunting and pecking. There are different modes for typing. Our default mode is standard mode. However, most people use touch typing mode, because with standard mode, we have to double-tap to type each of our letters, which is super slow. Touch typing makes our typing so much faster because we can simply touch a letter, and then we can just lift our finger to type it. We will be focusing on touch typing today.

We will need to use our rotor to switch from standard mode to touch typing. If we're not yet familiar with our rotor, we have a workshop called "The Rotor". It does a pretty good job of explaining exactly how our rotor works. We're really gonna wanna check that one out. Let's use our rotor to switch to touch typing. We'll just find typing mode in our rotor here. We'll find typing mode here.

VoiceOver: Misspelled words, edit, typing mode.

Douglas: Now that we have typing mode selected in our rotor, we can then swipe up or down until we find touch typing. How about we just swipe down here to find it?

VoiceOver: Touch typing.

Douglas: Great; we are now in touch typing mode. Hey, we are good to go. Our on-screen keyboard of course is here at the bottom of our screen. To begin typing, we will simply place our finger on our keyboard. We'll just slide or drag our finger around until we find the letter that we wanna type. If we happen to pause on a letter, we will hear the phonetic of that letter. That is a huge help for those letters that sound similar, like our M and N, or maybe our B and V.

Let's go ahead and give this a try. How about we go ahead and type a sentence? We will just type typing is fun here. I know, a bit corny maybe, but hey, we need something here. We will just place our finger somewhere near the bottom of our screen here and we'll type away. We'll just touch our keyboard here and begin sliding or dragging our finger around. We haven't lifted our finger yet. We paused on our letter T. We heard it give our phonetic there. Now that we've found our letter T, as soon as we lift our finger, we'll hear our letter T announced with a higher-pitch voice here. It will be added to our edit field. We'll just go ahead and lift our finger here.

VoiceOver: Cap T.

Douglas: Great; our letter T has been added. That is how we will add each of our letters here. How about we go ahead and type the rest of the word typing here? We'll finish our sentence, typing is fun. We'll just type the rest here.

When we put our space of course, VoiceOver read the word that we just typed. I tell you, that is pretty great. Our notes app attempts to predict the word that we're typing. Just above our on-screen keyboard, we're given a couple of word predictions as we type. We could slide our finger around to choose between these predictions, maybe if we don't wanna take the time to type the rest of our word, or maybe we're not quite sure of exactly how to spell the rest of the word. This can be a really helpful feature.

However, today is all about typing, so we will just type the rest of our sentence here. We'll type the rest of is fun here.

There you go. We have typed our sentence; almost. We need to add our period here. Apple has given us a quick and easy way to add our period. All we have to do is simply type two spaces and our period will automatically be added. We'll go ahead and just type two spaces here. We did it. We have typed our sentence. It might take a bit of practice before we begin to feel totally comfortable using our on-screen keyboard. However, before we know it, we will be taking notes, sending emails, and texting all of our family and friends. Again, my name is Douglas Walker. Take care, and I'll see you next time.