The iPhone: Without Sight or Hearing

Chapter 2: Setting Up Your iPhone for Voice Over and Braille Display

 

Setting up your iPhone is not going to be possible independently if you are totally deaf and blind. You will need sighted help or hearing blind help. You will probably need to understand the steps, though, in case the help you find doesn’t know.

Now, if you or someone you know has hearing or enough hearing to hear your phone, and blind or low vision, you can set up your iPhone from the first moment independently with the updates that came with iOS 5. When starting up the device before there was a screen telling you to connect to iTunes. Now it says welcome and start the set-up. From here just press the Home Button 3 times to start VoiceOver or even tap 3 times with 3 fingers to Zoom.

 

A sighted person or store clerk will need to have your phone set up completely with the phone carrier first. When you are ready to take over the control of the phone, the sighted person will need to go to settings and then go into the general tab. Under general, one needs to turn Bluetooth on under the Bluetooth tab. Select Bluetooth. Then slide the on/off selector to show on. Select the General button at the top, left to go back into the general options area. Next, you scroll down the general options page and select Accessibility. Under Accessibility options, select the first option which is Voice Over. Turn Voice Over On by sliding the on/off selector to show on. After this point, you will need to use the Voice Over method of tap and double tab to select and then enter the options you choose. You will also need to use three fingers to scroll. Next, you are going to go under the braille option, to discover and pair your braille display to the iPhone. Scroll down using three fingers and then tap and double tap to enter the braille options area. Once there, you need to turn on your braille display first, then you choose the bottom option of Choose a braille device. Your iPhone will now search and locate your device. Once it finds the device, it will ask you to enter the 4 digit code to pair. That code is unique to your brand of device and should be listed in the instructions guide for your device. Enter the code and your device will be paired and ready to use. You will know instantly because your braille display will begin showing the information sent from the iPhone. Now you can control your device. You can scroll and choose any other settings as you wish in the braille, Voice Over, or Settings area as you see fit.