Apple has a long history of including assistive technology in its products as standard features, and at no extra cost. This history started with the inclusion of accessibility features in Mac OS X, and has continued through to their mobile operating system, iOS.
The control panel, called Assistive Touch, will assist users who may have trouble using the standard gestures or the physical buttons on the iPad. For example, instead of using the swipe action (gesture) to move from screen to screen, you can tap on an icon instead. This may increase accessibility for users with a physical disability.
Once the feature is turned on in the accessibility settings, you can tap on a designated corner on the device to bring up the control panel.
Assistive Touch has four options in total:
iView is the ABC’s online ‘catch-up’ service where you can watch ABC TV shows and exclusive iView programs online. The iView website accessed via a personal computer has supported closed captions since March 2010. Until now, captions were not available to iPad users.
The ABC is currently the only free-to-air network in Australia with a catch-up service that supports captions. This is in contrast to the UK and US, which have seen multiple online players provide levels of captioning ahead of Australia.
By captioning your YouTube video, Google can index not only the title, description and tags of your YouTube video, but also the video content. This increases your search ranking, and the likelihood that your video will appear higher in Google and YouTube search results. This also results in more relevant ads in YouTube videos.
