In this video, we’ll look at the different settings that can make Procreate more accessible.
We have a lot to cover here so let’s head over to our iPad settings first and make a start.
On the left side of our settings, if we scroll down, we’ll usually find Procreate lurking somewhere at the bottom of this list.
Scroll a bit and find Procreate’s accessibility settings.
Now before we turn any of these on, we should look at some iPad accessibility settings that Procreate supports…
…larger text and initial touch location.
Let’s do that now. Scroll up and find accessibility.
Then Touch. Then Touch Accommodations.
We have to toggle Touch Accommodations on to use these settings.
Now, under Tap Assistance, we’ll turn on Initial Touch Location.
This setting dictates that any gestures performed are going to be triggered at the point of first contact,
even if that contact moves before a gesture is triggered.
We can also set a delay for this, which let’s us extend the amount of time that we have to register a tap.
To help with this, we’re now going to see a countdown appear wherever we make contact.
Procreate also supports larger text size, so we’ll set that up as well.
Jump back to the first page of Accessibility Settings and head inside Display and Text Size.
Then, Larger Text.
If we slide this up as far as it’ll go, we’ll get some nice big text.
But if we want more, we can check Larger Accessibility Sizes.
So let’s go as big as we can… …and we’ll head back to Procreate and see what this all looks like.
Nice big artwork thumbnails in our gallery
and while we’re in an active canvas, Our UI has gotten bigger too, which is great.
Okay, it’s time to turn on Procreate’s accessibility settings now.
We can jump straight to Procreate's Advanced settings from Actions...
then Help…and just here, Advanced settings.
Everything looks nice and big this time but we are now back where we started inside the Procreate tab of our iPad settings.
Our first Procreate specific accessibility setting, Single Touch Gestures Companion.
If we toggle this on we’re going to get a new companion window inside our active canvas.
This allows one touch input for some actions that would otherwise be accessed using multi touch gestures.
Next down, Colour Description Notifications.
Turning this on will give us a general description of any colour that we select, in text, at the top of our canvas.
Next is Feedback Sounds. This is great...
...with this on there’s a bunch of actions in Procreate that will now have audio cues when they’re triggered.
We’ll hear some of those in a moment.
Now, the last option here is not a feature as such.
Instead, this toggle allows support for the Tap Assistance - Initial Touch Location Setting that we turned on earlier.
If you are using the Initial Touch Location Setting, to get effective use of Procreate you will need to toggle this on.
So we’re all set up. Let’s take all of this for a spin.
The first new thing we can see here is our single touch gestures companion.
On the left side are the Undo and Redo buttons.
Next across is Zoom. If we toggle this on...
...now when we touch, a control line is drawn to the centre of the canvas.
We can then drag in and out or around the centre to zoom and rotate our canvas.
Toggle it off when we’re done.
Next across is Move. When we toggle this on...
...we can drag with a single point of contact to move our canvas around.
Last here in the companion is Fit Canvas.
Which will fit our entire canvas neatly within the screen.
We can reposition our companion by dragging from the top.
Now, let’s talk about colour.
We have Colour Description Notifications on, so as we select new colours...
...we’ll get a notification appear at the top of the canvas providing us with a general description of what that new colour is.
Something else that can be very helpful, is Colour Cards.
So we have these swatches from our chosen palette… …Colour Cards are bigger, bolder versions of these swatches
and they can be found in palettes.
Now at the top, if we switch from Compact over to Cards,
our palette list becomes a list of Colour Cards.
This keeps the ordering of our saved palettes and their colours
and it lets us scroll through all colours across all palettes continuously.
We’ll see cards are also accessible while we’re using the Colour Companion as well.
Now then, let’s take a look at both Motion Filtering and Motion Filtering Expression.
These two settings are focused on helping anyone with hand tremors and these settings work very closely together.
Motion Filtering can be applied to individual brushes or can be applied globally...or both actually.
We’re going start by looking at filtering within an individual brush.
First, tap any selected brush to get into brush studio.
And just here on the left in the Stabilisation settings, we’ll find Motion filtering.
Clear the drawing pad and we’re going to draw a preview stroke with enough variation in both speed and stroke direction,
so that while we edit these setting we're going to see the result change in real time.
Small and fast variations in direction at the start.
Then fast broad strokes in the middle...
...and smaller but much slower variations towards the end.
Now, just a quick point about the expression setting before we get going…
…expression requires at least some value to be defined in the Amount setting above, before it’s able to work.
If however, the Amount is set too high, then it will be too strong to allow expression to work.
Moving on. The Amount setting, at higher values, is going to filter out more motion from our brush strokes.
So much so, that here at one hundred percent, all motion has been removed
leaving only a straight line between the start and end points of our stroke.
Let’s now bring the amount down to…30 percent.
Now, Expression… this works by taking the Amount value
along with a greater consideration for time across a brush stroke,
and then focuses the amount at areas with changes in stroke direction in more clever, less linear ways.
The result is a less uniform squashing of motion across the entire stroke,
then you would get by just using Amount alone.
So by using just a little bit of Amount and Expression,
we can see the fast narrow motion from the start of our line has been filtered out.
The broader, still fast, area at the middle has been eased but still kept good definition at the corners.
The slower, shorter changes in direction near the end are preserved.
Okay, let’s hit done to commit the changes that we’ve made to this brush and we'll take it for a little test drive.
Just grab ourselves a nice colour first. That blue’s nice.
As we draw we can see that the small amount of filtering that we put on this brush isn’t restricting our directional changes much at all…
…our lines are nice and smooth.
Let’s have another crack at that second stroke, except this time we’re going to bump up the global filtering settings.
Global motion filtering is found in Actions…and in Preferences...
...and just here, Pressure and Smoothing.
We set this brush at 30 for amount and 40 for expression. Let’s set these global values to be a little higher
and then we’ll draw that line again. See how it feels.
It’s worth a mention, as soon as we have some value of filtering set, we’re going to get a toggle appear for tip attachment.
With this on, our brush strokes are painted from exactly where we make first contact.
With this off, the start point of the stroke is averaged across multiple start points.
It’s worth having a play to see what feels better.
It's on by default, so we’ll just leave this on.
Drawing our line again, we can see the effect of the filtering creeping back further through the stroke path.
The filtering itself is stronger so we do need to be a little larger with our movements to get a similar result as we had before.
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