Mirror Your Apple Watch to Your iPhone

If you have an Apple Watch Series 6 or later running watchOS 9, you can mirror the watch’s screen to your iPhone. The upside of this is you can use your iPhone’s other accessibility features like Assistive Touch and Voice Control with your Apple Watch. It also lets you use the iPhone’s screen recording feature to capture your Apple Watch’s screen.

To turn it on, go to Settings > Accessibility > Apple Watch Mirroring and turn on Apple Watch Mirroring. A panel appears showing your Apple Watch’s screen, and you can interact with your Apple Watch from that panel on your iPhone (Figure 103).

Save Magnifier “Activities”

The Magnifier app has several settings, like zoom level, brightness, color filters, and flashlight toggle. You can now save a sets of settings as Activities and easily switch among them.

To create an activity:

1. Set up Magnifier for the activity you want to save.

2. Tap the Settings button.

3. Choose Save New Activity.

4. Enter a name for the activity.

5. Tap Done.

You can then switch your activity by tapping the Settings button and choosing one from the top of the menu. To view and manage your activities, tap the Settings button, choose Settings, and then Activities.

Detect Objects with Magnifier

On select devices (so far, the iPhone 12 Pro, iPhone 13 Pro, 12.9-inch iPad Pro, and 11-inch iPad Pro), you can use the Magnifier app to detect doors and people. When these detection modes are enabled, you hold your device out so the camera can see your surroundings and Siri informs you when it detects the selected object and tells you how far away you are.

In the case of doors, it also tells you whether the door is open or closed and gives directions for opening the door if it’s closed.

You can also set it for Siri to provide image descriptions of whatever images are detected by the camera. It can do things like read the text on signs.

Here’s how to enable those detection modes:

1. Open the Magnifier app.

2. Tap the Detection Mode icon.

3. Three buttons appear on the left: People Detection , Door Detection , and Image Descriptions . Tap whichever ones are most relevant. You can select more than one at once.

You can then hold up your iPhone and Siri will describe the selected objects it detects (Figure 104). For example, with Door Detection, it tells you how far away the door is and whether it’s open or closed. Here is a video of it in action.

Hang Up with Siri and Adjust Siri’s Pause Time

You can use Siri to hang up phone calls on newer devices (iPhone 11 and later). Turn this on in Settings > Accessibility > Siri >Call Hangup. When it’s enabled, you can say “Hey Siri, hang up” during a call to end it. Note that the other party will hear your Siri command.

If Siri stops listening before you’re done issuing a command, you can now adjust how long Siri listens. Go to Settings > Accessibility > Siri and under Siri Pause Time, choose either Longer or Longest.

Enable Live Captions

Live Captions display text captions for all audio on your device. That could be FaceTime calls, movies, podcasts, YouTube videos, or other audio (Figure 105).

You can try it out by turning on Live Captions in Settings > Accessibility > Live Captions. A floating button appears on screen that you can drag around the screen as needed. If you find the button annoying, you can make it nearly transparent by adjusting the Idle Opacity slider in Setting > Accessibility > Live Captions > Appearance.

Tap the button to expand the Live Captions panel. Transcribed audio appears in this panel. Controls from left to right: shrink the panel, pause, listen through the microphone instead of on device, and expand the panel to fill the screen (Figure 106).

There are two other settings in Settings > Accessibility > Live Captions: Live Captions in FaceTime and Live Captions in RTT to selectively enable Live Captions for those applications. RTT is short for real-time text, a protocol for performing phone calls with text transcription.

Spell Words with Voice Control

When you turn on Voice Control in Settings > Accessibility > Voice Control, you can now use it to spell out words. Enter a text field and say “spelling mode.” Spelling Mode appears at the top of the screen, along with a notice that you can say “dictation mode” to return to regular Voice Control dictation. While in spelling mode, you can sound out individual letters to create custom word spellings

In my testing, Spelling Mode didn’t work great. For instance the letter “i” often isn’t recognized or iOS types it as a lowercase “L.” An alternative is to stay in Dictation Mode and instead say “tap letter name” to insert individual letters.