We are thankful to have a guest author, Elizabeth Stricker, for this blog post!
Apple (iOS) devices are built with a host of accessibility features. For my PALS (person with ALS), these features have been a lifeline. Once we learned how to use them, we could adapt his familiar phone as his needs changed. When it was time for eye gaze, it made a lot of sense to keep that journey going with an iOS device.
While Windows devices become accessible to eye gaze through software, such as Grid 3, your iPad uses the built in accessibility features. In practice, this means we use Grid for iPad primarily for communication, and the iPad’s AssistiveTouch menu for everything else.
Here are some of the tools we have found useful on our journey, and tips to make eye gaze work well for you.
Assistive Touch: A Handy Helper
For actions other than a single click using eye gaze, the AssistiveTouch menu is your helpful sidekick. It’s a dot that lives on your screen and gives you a shortcut to up to 8 actions.
Ours has:
- Scroll
- Hold and drag
- Move menu
- Pause/resume dwell
- Double tap (aka double click)
- Pinch
- Long press
- Home
To set it up, go to: Settings → Accessibility → Touch (under “Physical and Motor”) → AssistiveTouch (turn it on) → Customize Top Level Menu.
Hot Corners
You can also put action shortcuts in the corners of your screen to save a click.
Ours have:
- Scroll Down
- Toggle snap to item.
We don’t use the top 2, but you could if they work well for you.
Turn on “snap” on a page with lots of small buttons, like a keyboard. Turn it off when you are scrolling. It can tend to auto-click ads.
To set them up, go to: Settings → Accessibility → Touch (under “Physical and Motor”) → AssistiveTouch → Hot Corners (under “Tracking Sensitivity”).
Alternative Keyboards
The default keyboard can be hard to use accurately. Fortunately, iOS also lets you change the keyboard, and we found a good solution in a 3rd party app.
Microsoft Swift Key has a simpler, spaced button layout and predictive text that learns your preferences — just what we needed.
- First, download your preferred keyboard from the app store.
- Then, in the app, go through their prompts to enable it as a keyboard option with full access.
When you use the keyboard, you’ll notice this symbol: 🌐(a world wide web globe). Click on it to switch between your new keyboard and the default.
Learning our system has been a journey, but with the many options available, we have found that iOS is a flexible way for my PALS to communicate with the world.
Elizabeth Stricker BSN, RN Elizabeth spent 14 years as a nurse, supporting and educating countless patients. Today, she is the full-time caregiver of her husband, who is living with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). When he lost his ability to use his hands and speak, eye gaze technology helped him reconnect with the world. Elizabeth draws on her experience in patient education, her love of writing, and the lessons she and her PALS have learned together to create resources that support others on similar journeys.
