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Monday, September 1, 2014

Advice Expressed in an Anecdote

I've discovered that the best piece of advice I can offer anyone who has a problem to solve, tech or otherwise, is to use your favorite search engine and type in the question or problem; you may be amazed to find out that someone else has been seeking a solution to the same problem.
Last week I had stopped by one of our resource rooms, and the teacher said that the iPad he'd been given by our program had a sound problem. The sound was perfectly fine with speakers or headphones plugged in, but through the internal speakers, it was just making squawking sounds--very annoying--making the iPad useless to those students who depend upon the VoiceOver screenreader. I took the iPad, verified that with or without VoiceOver, sound was not emitting from the iPad correctly, then immediately went to the Safari app. I typed into the address bar [BTW, did you know you don't have to go to the google/bing/yahoo search page first? Just type your question/statement right into the address bar]:
"sound problem on my iPad Air".
A whole page of links appeared, and I scanned through the title links to see what might fit my issue. I finally settled on a link that was for an iPad 3, but hoped that it may apply to my Air. I can't remember now all of the information on the page, but the one suggestion I settled on fixed the problem! In true IT Crowd fashion (if you haven't seen the BBC series, I highly recommend it), I "turned it off and turned it on" by doing a reset of holding the Power and Home buttons together till the screen went dark and the Apple appeared and it restarted]. I left the teacher with the iPad, relieved that I didn't have another piece of equipment to get repaired, but asking the teacher to let me know if it happened again (in case this was a precursor to further issues).
So, this school year, in addition to my endless harping on using keyboard shortcuts (just ask any of the teachers I work with; I'm a broken record), I am now asking teachers to try to 'google' a tech problem or question--you may be surprised what you find!
One more great place to search: YouTube. There are so many people out there who have kindly posted how-to videos on a wide range of topics, including VI-specific videos on using low vision devices/software and braille devices and screen readers. You don't have to be an expert, you just need to learn how to hone your search skills--hey, this is great advice for your students, as well!!


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

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