by Brian Manning
In the heady and long distant days of my youth, access to newspapers and the printed media in general for vision impaired or blind people was basically non-existent or at least dependent on the kindness of family or friends.
Most of the information we received was second or third hand and rarely self-researched.
But all has changed, changed utterly and now because of advances in technology, higher standards of education and the proliferation of assistive technologies and media sources we have the potential to be perhaps the most informed individuals in any given room.
Now I usually am the go-to person if there is a query in the room about who is lining out for the match next Sunday, or what the hell is going on in the Dáil, or what is the story with your man in America.
Quite recently I found myself with a lot of time on my hands, so I signed up to numerous subscriptions and availed of some free media offerings and consequently found myself reading for more than four or five hours every day.
Over the next few weeks, I propose to present a few offerings on the various news sources I benefited from, going through the individual VoiceOver gestures and practices I used to get the most out of my perusals.
In the interests of simplicity, I will start with TheJournal.ie as this has an immersive reader built into it and is consequently the most user-friendly of them all.
To get started simply go to the App Store on your iPhone and download TheJournal.ie.
If you have queries on how to do this just contact the NCBI helpdesk and we will talk you through it.
Next navigate to TheJournal.ie app and double tap to open it.
Then continue to flick right until you hear an article you wish to read and double tap to open it.
Immediately you will be presented with a prompt, read full article with VoiceOver, double tap to read.
Do as instructed and listen to the article.
You can tap the screen with two fingers to pause the reading and when you have finished activating the back button with a double tap which can be located at the top left of the page.
You can also activate the back button with the two-finger scrub gesture from anywhere on the screen.
Once you have closed that page you can proceed with flicking right to the next article you wish to read and repeat the above process.
Happy reading and welcome to the cognoscenti.