New in iOS 5 – a soft button home key for iPhone and iPad

Can you use the soft (touch screen) buttons on your iPhone or iPad, but struggle with Home Key?

This is a common problem our clients experience, so it’s great to see some helpful new features in the new operating system, iOS 5.

The new Assistive Touch accessibility feature provides a soft Home button!

Turn on Assistive Touch in Settings, General, Accessibility. This creates a floating button, which activates the Assistive Touch menu, and can be moved to various locations on the screen.

Note: Assistive touch cannot be used when the screen is off. In Settings, change the Auto-Lock setting to never to keep the screen on all the time.

Assistive Touch also enables soft button control of device settings such as volume and screen rotation. You can also save gestures, such as swipe left/right, which can then be performed by a single tap.

Control device settings 

 Zoom with one finger  

We raised the issue of physical access to Apple Devices when we met with the Apple Business Development Manager in December 2009. It’s great to see they have made some helpful changes!

For more information about Accessibility for Apple products, see http://www.apple.com/accessibility/

Infrared Light Globe

This product is a screw-in LED light globe with its own infrared remote! The remote allows you to turn the globe on and off, but also to select from a wide range of colours!

The significance of a globe with an infrared remote is that its button functions can be trained into learning remotes and other more specialised devices for people with a disability (which we have done successfully).

We got ours from www.worldofthought.com.au for $35. It is 5W and has a stated life of 50,000 hours.