User Guide for Always in Mind
Always in Mind has be designed to let you enjoy the benfits of the latest electronic technology services with ease and safety. You'll readily be able to explore pictures, videos and music shared with you by a friend or relative while they use the services they are familiar. You can also take part in text message conversations and video calls.
This guide explains the features from the point of view of 2 different types of customers
- Viewer
- Supporter
As a viewer you just use Always In Mind without ever needing to worry about how things are shared with you or setting anything up. You just need to turn the device on and start using Always In Mind by selecting the activities you are interested in.
A supporter's role is to provide videos and photos for the viewer to explore. You do this by using services you already use or that are easy to sign up to. Services such as Google Photos, YouTube can be used and over time more will become available. The way that items are marked for sharing in ways that vary with the exact service being used. Details are provided below for the services.
It is possible to personalise the viewer's experience in a number of ways. Perhaps the most useful is the "technical comfort level" which allows the viewers experience of Always in Mind to be tailored to match their confidence in using technology. Lower comfort is supported by providing fewer options with less things on the screen. The comfort level can easily be alter at any time allowing adjust short term variations such as tiredness or longer term variations in preferences. More confident viewers can be presented a much richer set of features, controls and options. Some personalisations are specific to an activity, for example the speed that pictures change in a slide show can be adjusted. Further personalisations like colour themes will become available.
Always in Mind provides a number of "screens" each that lets you perform as specific activity such a viewing photos. A screen shows large "buttons" that can be "pressed" and may have other display items such as photo slideshow or video.
Buttons have text labels and sometimes pictures to explain what they do. The layout of the buttons is kept consistent between screens to aid familiarity, while the button style (colour) indicates the type of action a button performs (as explained below).
Movement between screens is kept as simple as possible to avoid getting "lost". Help is provided for each screen and button and this is available as text or computer speech.
It might be useful to think of the screens as being of 3 types:
- The home selection screen - choose what activity you want to do
- Chooser Screens - select an item you want to see such as a photo album or your message
- Activity Screen - perform an activity like watching your photo slide show
Extra features such as setting personalisation are available on the Support Bar. Normally hidden this can be displayed at any time. It allows the supporter to make changes and more confident users may also? to use it to adjust they're own experience. The Always In Mind Demo shows the Support Bar when it is started.
Buttons may be operated by a touch "press", a mouse (or other pointer) click and the keyboard space key. Physical keyboard users can also use tab and shift tab keys to move between buttons. A "Press" of a button will perform the action the button is provided to do, for example navigate to another screen or stop a slideshow of photos.
A long press of a button for about 1 second will provide help about what the button does. The help can be in text or speech.
The Support Bar can be hidden and shown with a left or right swipe (touch or pointer) and also using the S key.
The buttons are of several types as indicated by their style and colours
- Title - speaks when pressed if speech is not disabled
- Help - display a summary of how to use AiM
- Action - performs an action like "pause slideshow"
- Navigate - moves to a new screen or back to a previously displayed one.
Always in Mind provides easy access to resources and communication help in services like Google photos. When you request something like photos, Always in Mind talks to the service and asks for the resource. Sometimes this does not work properly and you then get a message like 'Cannot Load your photos'. Press the 'Continue' button and you can try again or do something else.
If Always In Mind is unable to fetch anything at all then you should check that your internet connection is working properly.
As a supporter you select which resources the viewer gets to access and how they are arranged. You do this using the services that Always in Mind connects to, for example Google Photos.
Google photos albums are shown in the Photo chooser screen and all photos or videos are show in the slideshow activity. You can select which photos are shown by uploading and updating the albums and photos the user has.
The video collections shown in the Video Chooser are the user's Youtube playlists. You can select which videos are shown by managing the playlist and adding or removing videos form the lists.
The Google tasklist 'Always in Mind Info' list all the web pages that can be viewed. You can select which pages are shown by managing the task list content. The task name becomes the information title and the notes contain the web address of the page. This is a temporary solution while we search for a better way to set Information pages.
Note that due to web security features, some original pages cannot be displayed and only the simplified 'readable' version is available. We are looking into this. Also scroll requires use of the scroll bar for now.
The options screen is available form the Support Bar and allows selection of various preferences.
The User Technical Comfort level alters how complex the screens are, mainly by changing how many buttons are shown. The 1st level skips the chooser screens and looks for resources labeled specially so they can be selected for the user, usually as 'Always in Mind'