VoiceOver

VoiceOver is a screen reader—software that makes the iPhone speak everything you touch. It’s a fairly important feature if you’re blind.

On the VoiceOver settings pane, tap the on/off switch to turn VoiceOver on. Because VoiceOver radically changes the way you control your phone, you get a warning to confirm that you know what you’re doing. If you proceed, you hear a female voice begin reading the names of the controls she sees on the screen. You can adjust the Speaking Rate of the synthesized voice (read on).

There’s a lot to learn in VoiceOver mode, and practice makes perfect, but here’s the overview:

• Touch something to hear it. Tap icons, words, even status icons at the top; as you go, the voice tells you what you’re tapping. “Messages.” “Calendar.” “Mail—14 new items.” “45 percent battery power.” You can tap the dots on the Home screen, and you’ll hear, ““About → These → Arrows” of “Photos App”.”

  Once you’ve tapped a screen element, you can also flick your finger left or right—anywhere on the screen—to “walk” through everything on the screen, left to right, top to bottom.

  Tip

  A thin black rectangle appears around whatever the voice is identifying. That’s for the benefit of sighted people who might be helping you.

• Double-tap something to “tap” it. Ordinarily, you tap something on the screen to open it. But since single-tapping now means “Speak this,” you need a new way to open everything. So: To open something you’ve just heard identified, double-tap anywhere on the screen. (You don’t have to wait for the voice to finish talking.)

There are all kinds of other special gestures in VoiceOver. Make the voice stop speaking with a two-finger tap; read everything, in sequence, from the top of the screen with a two-finger upward flick; scroll one page at a time with a three-finger flick up or down; go to the next or previous screen (Home, Stocks, and so on) with a three-finger flick left or right; and more.

Or try turning on Screen Curtain with a three-finger triple-tap; it blacks out the screen, giving you visual privacy as well as a heck of a battery boost. (Repeat to turn the screen back on.)

On the VoiceOver settings screen, you’ll find a wealth of options for using the iPhone sightlessly. For example:

• Speaking rate slider controls how fast VoiceOver speaks to you, on a scale of tortoise to hare.

• Speech is where you choose a voice for VoiceOver’s speaking. If you have enough free space, you can install Alex, Allison, Ava, Nicky, Susan, Tom, or Victoria, which are more realistic options. There are also Australian, Irish, South African, and British voices.

  Here, too, is the Pronunciation feature, which is described in “Speech”. Use Pitch Change makes the phone talk in a higher voice when you’re entering characters and a lower voice when you’re deleting them. It also uses a higher pitch when speaking the first item of a list and a lower one when speaking the last item. In both cases, this option is a great way to help you understand where you are in a list.

  Finally, here’s where you choose the language you want for the Rotor (next page).

• Verbosity makes the phone speak more to help you out more. For example, Speak Hints gives you additional suggestions for operating something you’ve tapped. For example, instead of just saying, “Safari,” it says, “Safari. Double-tap to open.” And Emoji Suffix makes the phone say (for example) “pizza emoji” instead of just “pizza” when encountering an emoji symbol.

• Braille, of course, is the system that represents letters as combinations of dots on a six- or eight-cell grid. Blind people can read Braille by touching embossed paper with their fingers. But in iOS they can type in Braille, too. For many, that may be faster than trying to type on the onscreen keyboard, and more accurate than dictation.

  On this Settings screen, you specify, among other things, whether you want to use the six- or eight-dot system.

  When you’re ready to type, you use the Rotor (described in a moment) to choose Braille Screen Input, which is usually the last item on the list. If the phone is flat on a table (“desktop mode”), then the “keys” for typing Braille are arrayed in a loose, flattened V pattern.

  If you’re holding the phone, you grip it with your pinkies and thumbs, with the screen facing away from you (“Screen away” mode).

• Audio gives you four options. Mute Sound Effects turns off the little clicks and chirps that ordinarily help you navigate as you scroll, tap, and so on. Audio Ducking makes music or video soundtracks get momentarily softer when the phone is speaking. Auto-select Speaker in Call switches the phone to the speakerphone automatically whenever you’re not holding it to your head. And Send to HDMI lets you send audio to an external HDMI device.

  Note

  That Auto-select Speaker in Call thing would be useful to almost anyone—but note that these features kick in only when VoiceOver itself is turned on.

• The Rotor is a brilliant solution to a thorny problem. If you’re blind, how are you supposed to control how VoiceOver reads to you? Do you have to keep burrowing into Settings to change the volume, speaking speed, verbosity, and so on?

  Nope. The Rotor is an imaginary dial. It appears when you twist two fingers on the screen as if you were turning an actual dial.

  And what are the options on this dial? That’s up to you. Tap Rotor in the VoiceOver settings screen to get a huge list of choices: Characters, Words, Speaking Rate, Volume, Punctuation, Zoom, and so on.

  Once you’ve dialed up a setting, you can get VoiceOver to move from one item to another by flicking a finger up or down. For example, if you’ve chosen Volume from the Rotor, then you make the playback volume louder or quieter with each flick up or down. If you’ve chosen Zoom, then each flick adjusts the screen magnification.

  

  The Rotor is especially important if you’re using the web. It lets you jump among web page elements like pictures, headings, links, text boxes, and so on. Use the Rotor to choose, for example, images—then you can flick up and down from one picture to the next on that page.

• Rotor Actions are specialized commands that app creators can add to the Rotor in their apps. If you have any such apps, their actions show up here, where you can turn them on or off individually.

• Typing Style. In Standard Typing, you drag your finger around the screen until VoiceOver speaks the key you want; then simultaneously tap anywhere with a second finger to type that letter.

  In Touch Typing, you can slide your finger around the keyboard until you hear the key you want; lift your finger to type that letter.

  There’s also Direct Touch Typing, which is a faster method intended for people who are more confident about typing. If you tap a letter, you type it instantly. If you hold the key down, VoiceOver speaks its name but doesn’t type it, just to make sure you know where you are.

• Phonetic Feedback refers to what VoiceOver says as you type or touch each keyboard letter. Character and Phonetics means that it says the letter’s name plus its pilot’s alphabet equivalent: “A—Alpha,” “B—Bravo,” “C—Charlie,” and so on. Phonetics Only says the pilot’s-alphabet word alone.

• Typing Feedback governs how the phone helps you figure out what you’re typing. It can speak the individual letters you’re striking, the words you’ve completed, or both.

• Modifier Keys. You can trigger some VoiceOver commands from a physical Bluetooth keyboard; all of them use Control-Option as the basis. (For example, Control-Option-A means “Read all from the current position.” A complete list of these shortcuts is at j.mp/1kZRSOz).

  The Modifier Keys option lets you use the Caps Lock key instead of the Control-Option business, which simplifies the keyboard shortcuts.

• Always Speak Notifications makes the phone announce, with a spoken voice, when an alert or update message has appeared. (If you turn this off, then VoiceOver announces only incoming text messages.)

• Navigate Images. As VoiceOver reads to you what’s on a web page, how do you want it to handle pictures? It can say nothing about them (Never), it can read their names (Always), or it can read their names and whatever hidden Descriptions savvy web designers have attached to them for the benefit of blind visitors.

• Large Cursor fattens up the borders of the VoiceOver “cursor” (the box around whatever is highlighted) so you can see it better.

• Double-tap Timeout lets you give yourself more time to complete a double-tap when you want to trigger some VoiceOver reading. Handy if you have motor difficulties.

If you think VoiceOver might be helpful, you can try it out first in a special practice mode. To begin, turn VoiceOver on in Settings → General → Accessibility → VoiceOver, and then tap VoiceOver Practice. When you’re done practicing, make sure you turn VoiceOver off again.

Both VoiceOver and Braille input involve learning a lot of new techniques. If you need these features to use your iPhone, then visit the more complete guide at support.apple.com/kb/HT3598.

Or spend a few minutes (or weeks) at applevis.com, a website dedicated to helping blind people use Apple gear.

Zooming

Compared with a computer, an iPhone’s screen is pretty tiny. Every now and then, you might need a little help reading small text or inspecting those tiny graphics.

The Zoom command is just the ticket; it lets you magnify the screen whenever it’s convenient, up to 500 percent. Of course, at that point, the screen image is too big to fit the physical glass of the iPhone, so you need a way to scroll around.

To begin, you have to turn on the master Zoom switch in Settings → General → Accessibility. Immediately, the magnifying lens appears.

Scroll down and look at the Zoom Region control. If it’s set to Window Zoom, then zooming produces a movable rectangular magnifying lens. If it’s set to Full Screen Zoom, then zooming magnifies the entire screen. (And that, as many Apple Genius Bar employees can tell you, freaks out a lot of people who don’t know what’s happened.)

Now then. Next time you need to magnify things, do this:

• Start zooming by double-tapping the screen with three fingers. You’ve either opened up the magnifying lens or magnified the entire screen 200 percent. (Another method: Triple-press the home button—or side button on the X-class phones—and tap Zoom.)

  Tip

  You can move the rectangular lens around the screen by dragging the white oval handle on its lower edge.

• Pan around inside the lens (or pan the entire virtual jumbo screen) by dragging with three fingers.

• Open the Zoom menu by tapping the white handle on the magnifying lens. Up pops a black menu of choices like Zoom Out (puts away the lens and stops zooming), Choose Region (lets you switch between a full-screen zoom and the lens view), Resize Lens (adds handles so you can change the lens’s shape), Choose Filter (lets you make the area inside the lens grayscale or inverted colors, to help people with poor vision), and Show Controller (the little joystick described in a moment). There’s also a slider that controls the degree of magnification—handy.

  

• Zoom in more or less by double-tap/dragging with three fingers. It’s like double-tapping, except that you leave your fingers down on the second tap—and drag them upward to zoom in more (up to 500 percent) or down to zoom out again.

  You can lift two of your three fingers after the dragging has begun. That way, it’s easier to see what you’re doing.

That’s the big-picture description of Zoom. But back in Settings → General → Accessibility → Zoom, a few more controls await:

• Follow Focus. When this option is turned on, the image inside the magnifying lens scrolls automatically when you’re entering text. Your point of typing is always centered.

• Smart Typing. When this option is turned on, a couple of things happen whenever the onscreen keyboard appears. First, you get full-screen zooming (instead of just the magnifying lens); second, the keyboard itself isn’t magnified, so you can see all the keys.

• Show Controller. The controller is this weird little onscreen joystick:

  

  You can drag it with your finger to move the magnifying lens, or the entire magnified screen, in any direction. (It grows when you’re touching it; the farther your finger moves from center, the faster the scrolling.) It’s an alternative to having to drag the magnified screen with three fingers, which isn’t precise and also blocks your view.

  You can tap the center dot of the Controller to open the Zoom menu described already. Or double-tap the center to stop or start zooming.

  Tip

  On iPhone 6s and later models, you can hard-press the controller for a pop-up magnifying lens. It remains open only as long as you’re pressing.

• Idle Visibility. After you’ve stopped using the joystick for a while, it stays on the screen but becomes partly transparent, to avoid blocking your view. This slider controls how transparent it gets.

• Zoom Region controls whether you’re zooming the entire screen or just a window (that is, a magnifying lens).

• Zoom Filter gives you options for how you want the text in the zoom window to appear—for example, black on gray for viewing in low light.

• Maximum Zoom Level. This slider controls just how magnified that lens, or screen, can get.

Magnifier

Oh man, this is great: You can triple-click the home button to turn the iPhone into the world’s best electronic magnifying glass (on X-class phones, you triple-click the side button). It’s perfect for dim restaurants, tiny type on pill bottles, and theater programs.

Once you’ve summoned the Magnifier, you can zoom in, turn on the flashlight, or tweak the contrast.

To set this up, open Settings → General → Accessibility → Magnifier. Turn on Magnifier. Turn on Auto-Brightness, too; it’ll help the picture look best.

Then, next time you need a magnifying glass, triple-click the home (side) button. Instantly, the top part of the screen becomes a zoomed-in view of whatever is in front of the camera.

At this point, you gain a wealth of options for making that image even clearer (above, left):

• Zoom slider. Adjusts the degree of magnification.

• . Turns on the flashlight, to illuminate the subject.

• . Locks the focus, so the phone quits trying to refocus as you move the phone. (You can also tap the screen for this function.)

• . Freezes the frame. That way, once you’ve finally focused on what you want to read, you can actually read it, without your hand jiggles ruining the view.

• . Opens the Filters screen (above, right).

The Filters screen offers even more tools for making things clear:

• Filter. Swipe horizontally across the screen (you don’t have to aim for the little row of filter names) to cycle among the Magnifier’s color filters: None, White/Blue, Yellow/Blue, Grayscale, Yellow/Black, Red/Black. Each may be helpful in a different circumstance to make your subject more legible.

• and sliders. Adjust the brightness and contrast of the image.

• . Swaps the two filter colors (black for white, blue for yellow, and so on).

To exit the Filters screen, tap again; to exit the Magnifier, press the home button (or, on Face ID phones, swipe up from the bottom of the screen).

Display Accommodations

These options affect the color schemes of the entire screen, in hopes of making it easier for you to see.

• Invert Colors. By reversing the screen’s colors like a film negative (black for white, red for green, blue for yellow), you create a higher-contrast effect that some people find is easier on the eyes.

  Classic Invert inverts every single pixel (below, center), which can create some bizarre-looking photos and videos. Smart Invert doesn’t touch photos, videos, app icons, or dark backgrounds (below, right). It inverts only light-colored iOS screen elements, making them dark; some people turn on this “dark theme” just because it looks cool and soothing.

  

• Color Filters. The iPhone can help you if you’re color-blind. The Color Filters option gives you screen modes that substitute colors you can see for colors you can’t, everywhere on the screen. Tap the various color-blindness types in the list (Red/Green, Blue/Yellow, and so on) to see how each affects the crayons or color swatches at the top of the screen. Use the Intensity slider to govern the degree of the effect.

  The Color Tint option washes the entire screen with a certain shade (which you choose using the Hue slider that appears); it’s designed to help people with Irlen syndrome (visual stress), who may have trouble reading. The Grayscale option removes all color from the screen. The Intensity slider lets you dial back (or dial up) the effect.

  The phone’s colors may now look funny to other people, but you should have an easier time distinguishing colors when it counts. (You may even be able to pass some of those Ishihara dot-pattern color-blindness tests online.)

• Auto-Brightness. This option has moved from its old address (in Settings → Display & Brightness). Auto-Brightness makes the screen brighten automatically when you’re in bright light; in dim light, it darkens. That’s because when you unlock the phone after waking it, it samples the ambient light and adjusts the brightness.

  Note

  This works because of the ambient-light sensor near the earpiece. Apple says it experimented with having the light sensor active all the time, but it was weird to have the screen constantly dimming and brightening as you used it.

  You can use this information to your advantage. By covering the sensor as you unlock the phone, you force it into a low-power, dim-screen setting (because the phone believes it’s in a dark room). Or by holding it up to a light as you wake it, you get more brightness. In either case, you’ve saved the navigation it would have taken you to find the manual brightness slider in Settings or in the Control Center.

  Tip

  You can set things up so that a triple-click of the home button (or the side button) instantly dims your screen, for use in the bedroom, movie theaters, or planetariums—without having to fuss with settings or sliders. See “The Instant Screen-Dimming Trick” for this awesome trick.

• Reduce White Point makes all colors ever depicted on the screen less intense—including the white of the background, which becomes a little yellowish. That might be nice if staring at your phone all day is causing you eyestrain.

Speech

Your phone can read to you aloud: an email message, a web page, a text message—anything. Your choices here go like this:

• Speak Selection puts a Speak command into the button bar that appears whenever you highlight text in any app. Tap that button to make the phone read the selected text.

• Speak Screen simply reads everything on the screen, top to bottom, when you swipe down from the top of the screen with two fingers. Great for hearing an ebook page or email read to you.

• Highlight Content. Great for dyslexic or beginning readers. If you turn this on, then the phone underlines or uses a highlight color on each word or sentence as it’s spoken, depending on your settings here.

• Typing Feedback. The phone can speak each Character as you type it (“T,” “O,” “P,” and so on), with or without Character Hints (“T—Tango,” “O—Oscar,” “P—Papa”). Here you can also specify how much delay elapses before the spoken feedback plays; whether you want finished words and autocorrect suggestions spoken, too; and whether you want to hear QuickType suggestions (“QuickType”) pronounced when you hold your finger down on them.

  This feature, of course, helps blind people know what they’re typing. But it also lets sighted people type without taking their eyes off the keyboard, which is great for speed and concentration. And if you’re zoomed in, you may not be able to see the suggested word appear under your typed text—but now you’ll still know what the suggestion is.

• Voices gives you a choice of languages and accents for the spoken voice. Try Australian; it’s really cute.

• Speaking Rate controls how fast the voice talks.

• Pronunciations. You can correct the phone’s pronunciation of certain words it always gets wrong. Type the word into the Phrase box; tap the and speak how it should be pronounced; and then, from the list of weird phonetic symbol-written alternatives, tap the one that sounds correct. This technique corrects how your phone pronounces those words or names whenever it speaks, including Siri and the text-to-speech feature described in “Dictation”.

How to De-Sparsify iOS’s Design

When Apple introduced the sparse, clean design of iOS 7 (which carries over into iOS 12), thousands blogged out in dismay: “It’s too lightweight! The fonts are too spindly! The background is too bright! There aren’t rectangles around buttons—we don’t know what’s a button and what’s not! You moved our cheese—we hate this!”

Well, Apple may not agree with you about the super-lightweight design, but it has given you options to change it. You can make the type bigger and bolder, the colors heavier, the background dimmer. You can restore outlines around buttons. And so much more.

All these options await in Settings → General → Accessibility.

Bold Text

The iOS system font is fairly light. Its strokes are very thin. But if you turn on Bold Text (and then tap Continue), your iPhone restarts—and when it comes to, the fonts everywhere are heavier: at the Home screen, in email, everywhere. And much easier to read in low light or with aging eyesight.

It’s one of the most useful features in iOS—and something almost nobody knows about.

Button Shapes

Among the criticisms of iOS’s design: You can’t tell what’s a button anymore! Everything is just words floating on the screen, without border rectangles to tell you what’s tappable!

Well, despite the name of this setting, the button shapes of old are gone in iOS 12. But you can still spot the tappable buttons because their text appears in blue type. And if that’s not enough for you, iOS can also underline that blue text to emphasize its tappability (below, right). Just switch on Button Shapes.

Reduce Transparency

Reduce Transparency adds opacity to screens like the Dock and the Notification Center. Their backgrounds become solid, rather than slightly see-through, so that text on them is much easier to read. You can see the before and after below.

Switch Control

Suppose your physical skills are limited to very simple gestures: puffing on an air pipe, pressing a foot switch, blinking an eye, or turning your head, for example. A hardware accessory called a switch lets you operate certain gadgets this way.

When you turn on Switch Control, the iPhone warns you that things are about to get very different. Tap OK. Now the phone sequentially highlights one object on the screen after another; you’re supposed to puff, tap, or blink at the right moment to say, “Yes, this one.”

If you don’t have a physical switch apparatus, you can use the one nature gave you: your head. The iPhone’s camera can detect when you turn your head left or right and can trigger various functions accordingly.

If you’d like to try it out, get to Settings → General → Accessibility → Switch Control. Tap Switches → Add New Switch → Camera → Left Head Movement. On this screen, you choose what a left head-turn will mean. The most obvious option is Select Item, which you could use in conjunction with the sequential highlighting of controls on the screen. But you can also make it mean “Press the home button,” “Activate Siri,” and so on.

Once you’ve made your selection, repeat that business for Right Head Movement.

When you return to the Switch Control screen, turn on Switch Control. Now your phone is watching you; whenever you turn your head left or right, it activates the control you set up.

The controls here let you specify how fast the sequential highlighting proceeds, whether or not it pauses on the screen’s first item, how many times the highlighting cycles through each screenful, and so on.

To turn off Switch Control, tap the on/off switch again. Or, if you’re using some other app, triple-press the home button to open the Accessibility shortcut panel (“Accessibility Shortcut”). If you had the foresight to add Switch Control to its options, then one tap does the trick.

Switch Control is a broad (and specialized) feature. To read more about it, open the Accessibility chapter of Apple’s iPhone User Guide: help.apple.com/iphone/12/.

AssistiveTouch

If you can’t hold the phone, you might have trouble shaking it (a shortcut for “Undo”); if you can’t move your fingers, adjusting the volume might be a challenge.

This feature is Apple’s accessibility team at its most creative. When you turn AssistiveTouch on, you get a new, glowing white circle in a corner of the screen (next page at top).

You can drag this magic white ball anywhere on the edges of the screen; it remains onscreen all the time.

When you tap it, it expands into the special palette shown here. It’s offering six ways to trigger motions and gestures on the screen without requiring hand or multiple-finger movement. All you have to be able to do is tap with a single finger—or even a stylus held in your teeth or toes.

You can add more buttons to this main menu, or switch around which buttons appear here. To do that, open Settings → General → Accessibility → AssistiveTouch → Customize Top Level Menu.

Meanwhile, here are the starter icons:

• Notifications, Control Center. As far as most people know, the usual way to open the Notifications pane and Control Center is to swipe up or down the screen. These buttons, however, give you another way—one that doesn’t require any hand movement. (Tap the same button again to close whichever center you opened.)

• Siri. Touch here when you want to speak to Siri. If you do, in fact, have trouble manipulating the phone, Siri is probably your best friend already. This option, as well as the “Hey Siri” voice command, mean that you don’t even have to hold down a button to start her up.

• Home. You can tap here, instead of pressing the physical home button, to get to your Home screen. (That’s also handy if your home button gets sticky.)

• Device. Tap to open six functions that would otherwise require you to grasp the phone or push its physical buttons (facing page, right). There’s Lock Screen (instead of pressing the side button), Volume Up and Volume Down (instead of pressing the volume keys), Rotate Screen, and Mute/Unmute (instead of flipping the silencer switch).

  If you tap More, you get some bonus buttons. They include Shake (does the same thing as shaking the phone to undo typing), Screenshot (“Capturing the Screen”), Multitasking (brings up the app switcher, as described in “The App Switcher”), Apple Pay (instead of using the home or side button), Restart, SOS (“Widgets on the Home Screen”), and Gestures.

  That Gestures button opens up a peculiar palette that depicts a hand holding up two, three, four, or five fingers. When you tap, for example, the three-finger icon, you get three blue circles on the screen. They move together. Drag one of them (with a stylus, for example), and the phone behaves as if you’re dragging three fingers on its surface. Using this technique, you can operate apps that require multiple fingers dragging on the screen.

• Custom. Impressively enough, you can actually define your own gestures. On the AssistiveTouch screen, tap one of the + buttons, and then tap Create New Gesture to draw your own gesture right on the screen, using one, two, three, four, or five fingers.

  For example, suppose you’re frustrated in Maps because you can’t do the two-finger double-tap that means “Zoom out.” On the Create New Gesture screen, get somebody to do the two-finger double-tap for you. Tap Save and give the gesture a name—“2 double tap,” say.

  From now on, “2 double tap” shows up on the Custom screen, ready to trigger with a single tap by a single finger or stylus.

Touch Accommodations

These options are intended to accommodate people who find it difficult to trigger precise taps on the touchscreen. Touch Accommodations is the master switch for all three of the following options:

• Hold Duration requires that you keep your finger on the screen for an amount of time that you specify (for example, one second—the seconds control appears when you turn Hold Duration on) before the iPhone registers a tap. That feature neatly eliminates accidental taps when your finger happens to bump the screen.

  When Hold Duration is on, a countdown cursor appears at your fingertip, showing with a circular graph how much longer you have to wait before your touch “counts.”

• Ignore Repeat ignores multiple taps that the screen detects within a certain window—say, one second. If you have, for example, a tremor, this is a great way to screen out accidental repeated touches or repeated letter-presses on the onscreen keyboard.

• Tap Assistance lets you indicate whether the location of a tap should be the first spot you touch or the last spot. The Use Final Touch Location option means you can put your finger down in one spot and then fine-tune its position on the glass anytime within the countdown period indicated by the timer cursor. Feel free to adjust the timer window using the controls here.

  Once you turn Tap Assistance on, you can specify how quickly you have to lift your finger for its touch to register as a tap—and whether or not the same time limit applies to swipe gestures.

Side Button (or Home Button)

If you have motor-control problems of any kind, you might welcome this enhancement. It’s an option to widen the time window for registering a double-press or triple-press of the home button (or, on the X-class phones, the side button). If you choose Slow or Slowest, then the phone accepts double- and triple-presses spaced far and even farther apart, rather than interpreting them as individual presses a few seconds apart.

This is also a place where you can remove the triggering of Siri from the home button/side button’s duties. If you choose Off here, then you can trigger Siri only by voice (“Hey Siri”). If you choose Voice Control, then holding in the button lets you speak only music-control and phone-dialing commands.

If your phone has a home button, this screen lets you turn off the Rest Finger to Open feature (“The Lock Screen”).

Finally, Use Passcode for Payments means that, when buying something from Apple, you can type in your Apple Store password instead of double-clicking the side button—convenient if you find that double-clicking business difficult.

Siri

You can type your questions and commands to Siri instead of speaking them, which can be a tremendous help if you have trouble speaking. (It’s also a tremendous help if you’re using Siri from the sidelines of a golf or chess tournament.) Here’s the Type to Siri on/off switch; see “Typing to Siri”.

3D Touch

The 3D Touch option (“Flick”) may be the hot feature of the iPhone 6s and later models. But it may also drive you crazy.

Here you can turn the feature off, or just adjust the threshold of pressure (Light, Medium, Firm) required to trigger a “3D touch.” (Apple even gives you a sample photo thumbnail to practice on, right on this screen, so you can gauge which degree of pressure you like best.)

Tap to Wake (Face ID phones)

The Face ID phones don’t have a home button to press for waking them, so they offer a consolation prize: this option, which lets you tap anywhere on the screen to wake the phone.

Keyboard

Show Lowercase Keys controls whether or not the onscreen keyboard’s keys turn into CAPITALS when the Shift key is pressed; see ???.

The others control what happens when you’ve hooked up a physical keyboard to your iPhone—a Bluetooth keyboard, for example:

• Key Repeat. Ordinarily, holding down a key makes it repeat, so you can type things like “auuuuuuuuugggggh!” or “zzzzzzzz.” These two sliders govern the repeating behavior: how long you must hold down a key before it starts repeating (to prevent triggering repetitions accidentally), and how fast each key spits out characters once the spitting has begun.

• Sticky Keys lets you press multikey shortcuts (involving keys like Shift, Option, Control, and ) one at a time instead of all together. (The Sound option ensures that you’ll get an audio beep to confirm that the keyboard has understood.)

  Toggle With Shift Key gives you the flexibility of turning Sticky Keys on and off at will. Whenever you want to turn on Sticky Keys, press the Shift key five times in succession. You’ll hear a special clacking sound effect alerting you that you just turned on Sticky Keys. (Repeat the five presses to turn Sticky Keys off again.)

• With Slow Keys turned on, the phone doesn’t register a key press at all until you’ve held down the key for more than a second or so—another feature designed to screen out accidental key presses.

Shake to Undo

In most of Apple’s apps, you can undo your most recent typing or editing by giving the iPhone a quick shake. (You’re always asked to confirm.) This is the On/Off switch for that feature—handy if you find yourself triggering Undo accidentally.

Vibration

Here’s a master Off switch for all vibrations the phone makes. Alarms, notifications, confirmations—all of it.

As Apple’s lawyers cheerfully point out on this screen, turning off vibrations also means you won’t get buzzy notifications of “earthquake, tsunami, and other emergency alerts.” Goodness!

Call Audio Routing

When a call comes in, where do you want it to go? To your headset? Directly to the speakerphone? Or the usual (headset unless there is no headset)? Here’s where you make a choice that sticks, so you don’t have to make it each time a call rings.

If you’d like to have the phone answer incoming calls automatically—when you’re elbow-deep in garden mulch while wearing AirPods, for example—here’s where you can turn on Auto-Answer Calls and tell the iPhone how long to wait before connecting.

Hearing

The next options in Settings → General → Accessibility are all dedicated to helping people with hearing loss. (Further details are at apple.com/accessibility/iphone/hearing.)

Live Listen

Apple originally invented Live Listen for use with iPhone-compatible hearing aids. It’s an ingenious feature that turns your iPhone into a remote microphone for your hearing aid.

In other words, if you’re having trouble hearing across the restaurant table, you can hand your phone to whoever’s talking—and now you hear them as though they were speaking directly into your ears. Or you can put your phone on the lectern at a lecture and hear the professor or speaker clearly from wherever you’re sitting. Or put the phone by the TV, and now you can hear perfectly without having to crank the volume.

In iOS 12, Apple has brought this feature to its wireless earbuds, the AirPods. Suddenly, Live Listen is available to a huge new audience—people who’ve spent $160 on AirPods, rather than $5,000 on a hearing aid.

To try it out, first add the Hearing button to your Control Center, as described in “Customizing the Control Center”. Now, when you’re ready to Live Listen, put on your AirPods. (Putting them on ensures that they’re awake and wirelessly connected to your phone.)

Then, on the phone, open the Control Center and tap Hearing. The Live Listen button is staring you in the face, but it’s Off. Tap it to turn on your “remote microphone”—the microphone on your iPhone. Place the phone where it will pick up the sound you want to hear, move to your seat (it can be more than 100 feet away), and marvel at the miracle of modern technology.

Media (Subtitle Options)

These options govern internet videos that you play in the iPhone’s TV app (primarily those from Apple’s own iTunes Store).

• Subtitles & Captioning. The iPhone’s TV app lets you tap the button to see a list of available subtitles and captions. Occasionally, a movie also comes with specially written Subtitles for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing (SDH). Tap Subtitles & Captioning → Closed Captions + SDH if you want that menu to list them whenever they’re available.

  The Style option gives you control over the font, size, and background of those captions, complete with a preview. (Tap the button to view the preview, and the sample caption, at full-screen size.) The Custom option even lets you dream up your own font, size, and color for the type; a new color and opacity of the caption background; and so on.

• Audio Descriptions. This option is for internet movies that come, or may someday come, with a narration track that describes the action for the blind.

Guided Access (Kiosk Mode)

It’s amazing how quickly even tiny tots can master the iPhone—and how easily they can muck things up with exploratory taps.

Guided Access solves that problem rather tidily. It’s kiosk mode. That is, you can lock the phone into one app; the victim cannot switch out of it. You can even specify which features of that app are permitted. Never again will you find your Home screen icons rearranged or your text messages deleted.

Guided Access is also great for helping out people with motor-control difficulties—or tweens with self-control difficulties.

To turn on Guided Access, open Settings → General → Accessibility → Guided Access; turn the switch On. Now a Passcode Settings button appears. Here’s where you protect Guided Access so the little scamp can’t shut it off—at least not without a six-digit passcode (Set Guided Access Passcode) or your fingerprint, or your face.

You can also set a time limit for your kid’s Guided Access. Tap Time Limit to set up an alarm or a spoken warning when time is running out.

Finally, the moment of truth arrives: Your kid is screaming for your phone. Open whatever app you’ll want to lock in place. Press the home button three times fast (on the X-class iPhones, it’s the side button). The Guided Access screen appears. At this point, you can proceed in any of three ways:

• Declare some features off-limits. With your finger, draw a circle around each button, slider, and control you want to deactivate. The phone converts your circle into a tidy rectangle; you can drag its corners to adjust its size, drag inside the rectangle to move it, or tap the to remove it if you change your mind or want to start again.

  Once you enter Guided Access mode, the controls you’ve enclosed appear darkened (facing page, right). They no longer respond—and your phone borrower can’t get into trouble.

• Change settings. If you tap Options, you get additional controls. You can decide whether or not your little urchin is allowed to press the Sleep/Wake Button or the Volume Buttons when in Guided Access mode. If you want to hand the phone to your 3-year-old in the back seat to watch baby videos, you’ll probably want to disable the touchscreen altogether (turn off Touch) and prevent the picture from rotating when the phone does (turn off Motion).

  Here, too, is the Time Limit switch. Turn it on to view hours/minutes dials. At the end of this time, it’s no more fun for Junior.

• Begin kiosk mode. Tap Start.

Later, when you get the phone back and you want to use it normally, triple-press the home (or side) button again; enter your passcode or offer your fingerprint or face. At this point, you can tap Options to change them, Resume to go back into kiosk mode, or End to return to the iPhone as you know it.

Accessibility Shortcut

Burrowing all the way into the Settings → General → Accessibility screen is quite a slog when all you want to do is turn some feature on or off. Therefore, you get this handy shortcut: a fast triple-press of the home button (or the side button).

That action produces a little menu, in whatever app you’re using, with on/off switches for the iPhone’s various accessibility features.

It’s up to you, however, to indicate which ones you want on that menu. That’s why you’re on this screen—to turn on the features you want to appear on the triple-press menu. Your options are AssistiveTouch, Classic Invert Colors, Color Filters, Magnifier, Reduce White Point, Smart Invert Colors, Switch Control, VoiceOver, Zoom, and Touch Accommodations.

The Instant Screen-Dimming Trick

The Accessibility settings offer one of the greatest shortcuts of all time: the ability to dim your screen, instantly, with a triple-click. You don’t have to open the Control Center, visit Settings, or fuss with a slider; it’s instantaneous. It’s a gift to people who go to movies, plays, nighttime picnics, or anywhere else where full screen brightness isn’t appropriate, pleasant, or comfortable—and digging around in the Control Center or Settings takes too much time.

It’s a bunch of steps to set up, but you have to take them only once. After that, the magic is yours whenever you want it.

Ready? Here’s the setup.

1. Open Settings → General → Accessibility. Turn on Zoom.

   If the magnifying lens appears, tap the white handle at the bottom of it; in the shortcut menu, tap Zoom Out (below, left).

   Now the magnifying lens is gone.

2. Scroll down to Zoom Region and set it to Full Screen Zoom.

3. Tap Zoom Filter; tap Low Light. Tap Zoom (in the upper left) to return to the previous panel.

   You’ve just set up the phone to dim the screen whenever zooming is turned on. Now all you have to do is teach the phone to enable zooming whenever you triple-click the home button (or side button).

4. In the top-left corner, tap Accessibility.

   You return to the main Accessibility screen. Scroll to the very bottom.

   

5. Tap Accessibility Shortcut; make sure Zoom is the only selected item.

   As noted in the previous Tip, this step may involve turning off Magnifier and Guided Access in Settings → General → Accessibility.

At this point, you can go back to the Home screen.

From now on, whenever you triple-click the home or side button, you turn on a gray filter that cuts the brightness of the screen by 30 percent. (Feel free to fine-tune the dimness of your new Insta-Dim setting at that point, using the Control Center; see “Control Center”.) It doesn’t save you any battery power, since the screen doesn’t think it’s putting out any less light. But it does give you instant darkening when you need it in a hurry—like when a potentially important text comes in while you’re in the movie theater.

Triple-click again to restore the original brightness, and be glad.