iPad Accessibility Opportunities

There are a range of accessibility options built in, these include VoiceOver, Zoom, White on Black, Mono Audio, Speak Auto-text and Triple-click Home. Not had a chance to see what all these do but will do in due course.

The first advantage that comes to mind is that you can operate this device with one finger, there's no mouse, shift key etc. I suppose you could operate a laptop with one finger but it would be much more difficult.
One would imagine the intellectual capacity required to use this device would be less than that for operating a laptop given you simply touch what you want to make “go”, it's intuitive.

One of the main challenges I foresee is that the device is not tactile, i.e. how would a sight impaired person know if they were pressing the right spot on the screen? I suppose it may be possible to overlay some form of tactile material to help overcome this problem. Perhaps an area to research?

I'm sure there will be apps developed that are related to accessibility.
I have been using an app called Pressreader, you can view practically any newspaper from around the world and it has an amazingly good voice synthesizer built in so you can sit back and listen to the news being read out. I've also tried a US only app called Dictation from Dragon, voice to text, this also works really well.

Apple has built in a number of tools to help site impaired people and I would be really interested to see research or feedback from somebody in this group that has used the iPad. How do they get past the fact there's no tactile feedback and only a flat screen?
No doubt research into the opportunities of this device to help people with disabilities will come up with many different uses, after all there are many different disabilities with different assistive requirements.

iPad Review

So I've had the iPad for a few days and I think I get it and I also have experienced its limitations.

First the iPad does nothing that a laptop can't do but it's the form factor that makes it work. The touch screen interface is just natural and intuitive, so for things that are already set up like apps it's quicker to just touch the app to go to it than use a mouse and keyboard, browsing web sites works well with the touch interface. If you've used an iPhone you probably already know this.

It's small enough to take on holiday or for work trips for email. You could watch a movie in a cramped airline seats I imagine where a laptop is often just too big with it's keyboard and screen. The form factor means you can have a coffee while browsing the news or website with one free hand, not easily achievable with a laptop.

The weight of this device though is too heavy to hold unassisted, ebook readers are better suited to holding as a book and for an insomnia inflicted person like myself the bright screen is a no no before going to bed. Some more comments about this issue here - http://www.ipadlearninglab.com/2010/05/ipad-as-sleep-disrupter.html

It's quick, if I want to quickly look something up on the web I have it had my fingertips in seconds, my trusty laptop with a solid state hard disk still take 10-30 seconds before I can start typing.

You cannot touch type on an iPad, I tried but failed with quickly strained wrists. The problem is you cannot rest your fingers on the keyboard so your hands have to hover a few millimetres above the screen which leads to fatigue very quickly. If I were to go on a business trip with this I would absolutely take a keyboard.

I did type this on the iPad, with two fingers, but actually in the end emailed the posting to my laptop because it was just easier to type on, spell check and post.

The educational affordances of this device are plain to see, the ability to carry many books with full interactivity is a great educational bonus and unlike ebooks on other cheaper devices ebooks on the iPad are in full colour and can include full multimedia. There are apps coming out for our ePortfolio system and our LMS, of course students could use a cheap netbook for these purposes. Without testing I'm guessing that the graphic capabilities of this device probably exceed those of a cheap netbook.

It's a great device to share and display media. I left it on the coffee table at a party we had and people picked it up to look at photos and handed it around, finally all my digital pics can be shared in a natural way rather than handing a laptop around or standing in front of a desktop computer. The intuitive interface means even my parents could browse the photos.

So I think in summary the iPad is an excellent media consumption device, the apps are great and surfing the web and replying to short emails on the run is easy but without a keyboard you can't do too much typing without fatigue. I guess if you normally only type with two fingers then perhaps you won't notice this?