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I’ve made a tonne of videos on this channel where I talk about tips and tricks, things
that your iPhone can do that you might not know about.
And one area that usually gets at least one or two mentions in each of those videos, is
the accessibility menu.
Accessibility is the part of the iPhone that’s designed to ensure that everyone, regardless
of their personal ability or needs, can get the most out of their iPhone, but I think
because of that, a lot of people don’t spend time checking the accessibility menu of their
devices out, because it really is a gem, with loads of settings and features worth considering.
So in this video, I’m going to talk through my favourite accessibility features and functions,
show you what they do and how to set them up, and then you can consider whether any
of them might be helpful to you.
OK, let’s get into it.
One of the best features of the iPhone, is the ability to pinch and push to zoom in and
out on the screen, and that’s especially useful if you find viewing things on your
iPhone difficult, you can zoom in on a picture for example to view it more closely.
Trouble is, this only works on certain parts of the iOS user interface.
Text for example, or photos, but not everything.
If you find yourself often needing to zoom in on parts of iOS where zooming isn’t typically
supported, you might want to activate the Magnify Content function.
To do this, go to Settings, then Accessibility, then Zoom, and ensure that it’s toggled
on.
With this enabled, double-tap on the screen with three fingers to enable the magnification
box.
It’s got this little pill-shaped button at the bottom of it, and you can use your
finger to move the box around the screen by tapping and holding there.
Double-tap with three fingers again to remove the zoom.
Notice down at the bottom of the setting for this, that you can choose how much zoom you’d
like to apply when you enable this, going all the way up to a 15 times zoom, so hopefully
you can find a level that suits you and your vision.
You can also enable a function called Smart Typing.
If I switch this on, watch what happens if I go to Messages for example.
I’m in a new message, and I want to type a message out to someone, so my cursor is
here in the message box, but the text as I type is very small.
If I double tap with 3 fingers on the screen to enable zoom, the phone recognises that
I’m working with a keyboard, and so it zooms into the message box, and follows the text
as I’m writing, but without magnifying the keyboard.
So I can type away quite happily, clearly seeing what I’m typing, and then when I’m
done, just double tap with three fingers again to return to the normal messages view.
This is one of those accessibility functions that most people I speak to have absolutely
no idea about, and yet it feels like some kind of magic.
Just like your iPhone can be configured to constantly listen out for it’s voice assistant
trigger phrase - I’ll write it on the screen now so as not to enable your voice assistant,
your phone can also be configured to listen out for specific sounds.
The iPhone has incredibly capable microphones built into it, and these microphones can,
with your permission of course, listen out for sounds that you might find difficult to
hear yourself, but that you would like to be alerted to if picked up.
For example, a dog barking, or a doorbell chiming, or glass breaking, or a baby crying.
There’s a whole range of sounds that your iPhone recognises, and can identify and alert
you to.
To enable this function, head into Settings, then Accessibility, then Sound Recognition,
and toggle it on.
Your phone might have to download some software update files for this, but the files are pretty
small, a few megabytes I think.
You can then choose which sounds you’d like your phone to listen out for, and you can
even choose a custom tone for the different sounds if you wish.
Now look, I can already visualise the comments section of this video where I’ve got a tonne
of people saying something like, “I won’t let my iPhone listen to me” and, fair enough,
you are of course going to have to trust that Apple are going to be responsible when you
allow your iPhone to constantly listen out for sounds, Apple do have a really good track
record when it comes to user privacy, but if that’s a deal breaker for you, you might
not want to enable this function, but if you’re OK with it, and a second pair of ears listening
out for something important sounds good to you, why not try this feature?
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If you’ve purchased an iPhone Max model, and keep in mind that the upcoming iPhone
14 apparently has 2 Max models in the range, you’re using a pretty enormous iPhone, all
things considered.
Even the iPhone 13 Pro, the one that I use, is pretty big, especially if you’ve got
quite small hands.
Assuming that you hold your iPhone with one hand, a movement that you’ll often need
to do is getting your thumb up to the top of the screen, as this is usually where the
back button is located on most apps.
Twitter for example, if I’m browsing Twitter, I have to do this literally each time I go
into a tweet, then want to come back out to return to my feed.
It’s a stretch, and it’s quite uncomfortable.
But there’s an Accessibility feature you can enable to help with this, and it’s called
Reachability.
To enable this, head to Settings, then Accessibility, then Touch, and ensure that Reachability is
toggled on.
Now to make this work, you have to do a little swipe gesture downwards, in the bottom part
of your screen, I’d say if you do this around the bottom 1/8 of your screen, that should
generally work.
It takes practice to get this to work, but honestly after a few attempts, repeating this
until I felt like I knew exactly where to swipe, it becomes muscle memory, and if you’re
using your phone one-handed but struggle to reach the top of the screen, this is a bit
of a game changer.
This is probably the most well-known accessibility function out there, and for good reason, it’s
a really clever use of the iPhone’s touch sensitivity, and opens up options that I think
most people will find a use case for.
Essentially, you can configure your iPhone to recognise a double or triple tap on the
rear of the phone, and respond with a function.
To enable this, head to Settings, then Accessibility, then Touch, and then scroll down to the bottom
and ensure that Back Tap is enabled.
You can set this for both a double tap of the rear of the phone, and a triple tap, and
my advice would be to experiment to find whatever works best for you.
In my experience, double-tap can be activated a bit too easily on occasion, but you might
not find this, so have a play around with it.
If I tap into the Double Tap option, you can see that there are a number of functions that
I can assign to the double tap.
You can assign system functions like taking a screenshot, accessing the camera, activating
Siri, there’s a whole host of things to choose from here.
Below that, you have accessibility functions, like activating voice over or zoom.
Below that, you have scrolling down the screen and scrolling up the screen.
And then below that, you’ve got Shortcuts.
Your section here will look different to mine, as this is literally accessing the shortcuts
that you’ve got setup within your shortcuts app, and that’s going to be different for
everyone, if you’d like an introduction to the shortcuts app, I’ve made an entire
video about that subject, I’ll link to it in the description of this one.
For the sake of illustration, let’s keep it simple, let’s choose screenshot.
With that enabled, I’m going to come out of Settings, and here on the Home Screen,
I’m going to double-tap the back of my iPhone with my index finger, and a screenshot is
taken.
Now, one thing to mention is that cases, like the one I’ve got here, this is a super strong
carbon fibre case, these can impact the effectiveness of this particular hack, essentially your
case can be so good at reducing shock to the phone that it can make it so that the phone
doesn’t recognise the taps very well, which is a good thing overall, but you’ll need
to experiment with your phone and case, and also consider switching to triple tap, sometimes
that can actually work better in those kind of situations.
A lesser known accessibility function is the ability to lock your phone into a specific
app.
I’ve found that people either don’t know about this one, or they’ve looked at it,
but deemed it too complicated to use, and it really isn’t, as I’ll now show you.
Let’s start by going to Settings, then Guided Access, and toggling it on.
Under passcode settings, you either input a PIN that you’ll use to enable and disable
this feature, and obviously it should be a pin that only you know, or you can usually
enable things like Touch ID or Face ID if your phone has those options.
Notice this button a bit further down, which we’re going to want to toggle on, Accessibility
Shortcut.
It says here that by tapping the side button here on my iPhone 13 Pro, we’ll enable Guided
Access, so that’s what we’re going to do.
I’m then going to open a game on my phone, and with the game open, I’m going to triple
tap the side button and choose Guided Access.
Down here at the bottom left, we’ve got some options.
I can choose whether to enable or disable any of the following - the side button, the
volume buttons, motion, the keyboards, touch on the touch screen, and set a time limit.
You can see that I’ve disabled the side button, the volume buttons and haven’t set
a time limit, but I’ve left motion, keyboards and touch enabled.
I’m then going to press Start up at the top right, and input the PIN I’d like to
use.
The game, solitaire in this case, is totally playable.
But notice if I try and swipe away from the app, to go back to the Home Screen.
The phone won’t let me.
The side button also doesn’t work, so I can’t lock the phone.
I also can’t change the volume, because I chose to lock that out.
There are multiple use cases here, but I’d imagine that for many parents or carers, this
would be a great tool to know when giving your phone to a child, or someone who you
don’t want to be able to access things outside of the game or app that you’ve set them
up in.
You can literally lock your phone down, so that the person can have full access to whatever
you’ve given them access to, but they can’t go reading your messages or purchasing items
on Amazon, for example.
When you’re done, triple tap on the side button, then input your PIN, and then choose
End.
The phone now returns to normal operation.
I used this when I got married a few months ago, during our wedding reception, my wife
and I had a playlist that we wanted the venue to play, but I didn’t feel comfortable handing
over my phone to someone, with unlimited access.
I used Guided Access to lock the phone to Spotify, so the venue had full controls of
the Spotify app, but couldn’t do anything else with my phone.
The iPhone makes really good use of swipe based gestures, things like being able to
swipe down from the top of the screen to access control centre for example, where you can
then access a wealth of helpful iPhone features.
But some people find the reliance on swiping challenging, and if that sounds like you,
you should definitely check out Assistive Touch.
Head into Settings, then Accessibility, then Touch and then toggle Assistive Touch on.
You’ll see this little button appear toward the bottom of your screen, which you can move
around by pressing and holding on it, then dragging it around as you need to.
This button is a constantly-on your screen smart button, that you can customise to give
you access to pretty much anything that you need.
So for example, if I tap on mine, you can see that I’ve got quick access to the notification
centre, I can take a screenshot, I can access Siri, I can go to the Home Screen, I can access
the Control Centre, and I’ve got some device related functions here.
Pressing on that, I can lock the screen, change the volume, unmute the device, rotate the
screen, and if I tap into More, there’s even more functions, like the ability to restart
the phone or access Apple Pay.
The Back arrow will take you back.
Now I said that you can customise this, and the way that you would do that is by tapping
into Assistive Touch.
Then for example, if you tap into Customise Top Level Menu, you can select items in here,
and then change them.
For example, if I don’t want Siri, I could tap on that, and then choose something else.
You can even choose Shortcuts, and if you know anything about Shortcuts, you’ll know
that you can customise them to do pretty much anything on your phone, if you don’t know
anything about Shortcuts, be sure to check out my Intro to Shortcuts video.
In Custom Actions, you can specify what the Assistive Touch button should do with a single
tap, a double tap and a long press.
You can even create your own gestures in Create New Gesture.
Then, so long as you’ve got Custom enabled as one of the button options in your assistive
touch menu, you can then input that custom gesture, and assign it to an action.
This is a really handy menu, if some of the more traditional methods of interacting with
your iPhone don’t really work for you.
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If you own a pair of AirPods, as well as your iPhone, you can enable a function called Live
Listen.
This is where your iPhone essentially becomes a portable microphone, that relays back to
your AirPods.
So if for example, you’re out for a meal in a noisy restaurant, and you’re struggling
to hear the person you’re with, you could position your iPhone close to them, and use
the AirPods to allow you to better heat what they’re saying.
It’s no replacement for dedicated listening aids of course, but it’s a good feature
to have.
There’s two steps to enabling this.
First, head to Settings, then Control Centre, and ensure that Hearing has been selected.
If it’s not in this menu up here at the top, you’ll need to scroll down until you
see it, then press the Green Plus icon to add it to the Control Centre.
Then, with your AirPods connected to your device, open Control Centre, and tap the Hearing
icon, then enable Live Listen.
You should then be able to hear through the iPhone’s microphone.
Siri is a very capable voice assistant, it might not be as capable as it’s competition,
but it’s good and it’s getting better all the time.
I’m sure you already know how to activate it, and that you can use it to achieve a number
of things on your phone, do check out my Siri videos if you’ve not already.
But, some people find communicating with Siri challenging, and if that sounds like you,
you might prefer the option of typing your requests to Siri instead.
That way, instead of saying something like ‘what’s the weather going to be like tomorrow’,
you could instead type ‘weather tomorrow’, and you’d get the same result.
But you need to enable this.
Head to Settings, then Accessibility, then Siri, and enable ‘type to Siri’.
Then, when you press and hold the side button, instead of Siri listening out for you to say
something, you’ll type in the text box instead.
When you hit done, that’s the same as stopping speaking, and your voice assistant will respond
accordingly.
This is a really handy feature if you struggle with reading content on your iPhone.
You can have your iPhone speak content for you.
To enable this, head to Settings, then Accessibility, then Spoken Content.
There are two options to choose from here, and I’d advise you to try out both, and
see how you get on with them based on your use case.
Speak Screen will literally, speak out the entire contents of a screen to you, but the
problem with that is that it will not only speak the content of your article for example,
but it will also include every link or button, including the text behind the links and buttons.
It can get a bit much, especially on busy websites.
If you do choose to enable this, I’d recommend that you also enable Speech Controller, this
little side option that gives you playback controls whilst you’re listening to the
spoken content.
What might be better for most people is Speak Selection.
With this, you first select the text that you’d like speaking out to you, in the standard
way that you select text on iOS, then tap Speak when it shows in the menu above.
Your phone will then speak just the content that you’ve selected out to you.
Now obviously, I wouldn’t recommend this for having an entire audiobook narrated to
you, but if what you’re after is a quick way to have the contents of a website or a
short article narrated to you, this could actually be really helpful.
VoiceOver is pretty much what it sounds like, an audio aid to help you understand what’s
happening on your phone, if you find seeing what’s happening on your phone difficult.
When the voice over function is enabled, tapping on a button or an app on your phone, will
result in your phone announcing whatever you just pressed, so you know where your fingers
are in relation to your screen, and you can then double-tap in the same place to open
the app, or activate the function that you pressed.
To enable it, head to System Preferences, then Accessibility, and toggle VoiceOver on.
You’ll get a warning from your phone before you do this, and that’s because this is
a pretty significant accessibility feature to switch on, in so much as it really does
change the core functionality of your phone, and it can therefore be challenging to switch
this off until you’ve got the hang of it, so you have been warned.
But essentially, with this toggled on, when you tap on say, the camera app, whereas with
this function switched off, your phone would open the camera app, with VoiceOver switched
on, it will instead announce the phrase ‘Camera - app’ to you, letting you know what you
just tapped on.
So, if you then realise that you hadn’t intended to select the camera, you could keep
looking for it, but if you realised that you did want to open the camera, you would double-tap
in the same place to open it.
So there you go, 10 really useful Accessibility functions, that I think everyone should know
about, regardless of their personal ability.
At the end of the day, anything that makes your iPhone more usable has to be a good thing
right?
What about you, any accessibility features that you use, that I’ve not included here?
Drop me a comment and let me know.
And as ever, if you found this video useful, do please consider leaving me a like, and
subscribing to my channel for more content like this in the future.
See you on the next video.