Android Low Vision: Magnify Full and Partial Screen with Accessibility Button

Today we're going to check out how to use the magnification feature to switch between magnifying the full screen and magnifying just part of it.

Magnification is a built-in feature that's used to quickly zoom in so we can make things on the screen appear larger and easier to see. We learned how to set up magnification in another workshop in this series where we focused on the full screen.

To learn how to switch between the full and partial screen, let's start by heading over to the magnification settings which we'll find within our settings app. Settings is right here on the home screen, so we'll tap on it to open it.

Here we are in settings, and now we'll scroll down to find accessibility. And there it is. So we'll tap on accessibility to open it.

Under the display heading, we'll scroll down again to find magnification. This is where we set up our shortcut to use the accessibility button in another workshop. And this is where we'll make changes to try a different option. So, let's touch right here on magnification to open the magnification settings.

Now, we'll scroll down again to look at the choices under the options heading. On this phone, we see that magnification shortcut has been turned on. The circle within the toggle switch is over on the right side, and the text tells us this shortcut has been set to the accessibility button. Below that, we can see that magnification type has been set to full screen.

Now we're going to look at another option. So, let's tap the magnification type button to see the options.

And here we are. Under choose how to magnify, the button for magnify full screen is selected and the next option is magnify part of screen. We're going to scroll down to find switch between full and partial screen.

There we go. Let's tap the button to select this one. And then we'll touch the save button in the lower right corner of the screen to save our choice.

Now, let's check out how this feature works. We'll start by going to our home screen. To do this, we'll move down to the navigation bar at the bottom of the screen, and right in the center of our navigation bar, we'll find the home button. If you like to use gestures, you can get to the home screen by swiping up with one finger from the bottom of the screen. Be sure to check out the resources below for more info on gesture navigation or how to switch between gesture navigation and the navigation bar. For now, let's go ahead and tap the home button inside the navigation bar.

And now we're on our home screen. To open our list of apps, let's move to the bottom of the screen and swipe up with one finger. Just like that.

Now that our list of apps is open, let's tap on the accessibility button to turn on magnification. We've set up the accessibility button so it's in the bottom right corner of the screen within the navigation bar, and we'll tap it here.

Now our magnification has been on. From here, we have a few options. We can zoom in temporarily, and you can learn about that feature in our workshop on quick zoom, or we can tap the screen and that magnifies our full screen like we showed in another workshop. But for this workshop, we're going to check out one more option. Switching to partial screen magnification.

When we tap the screen while magnification is turned on, we notice a small floating button appears in the lower right corner of the screen, and after a few seconds it disappears.

This is called the switch control, and this is what will use to switch between full screen and partial screen magnification. So, let's make the switch control appear again and we'll do that just by tapping the screen. And let's be sure to tap on a blank part of the screen. If we tap on a button or a live link, we'll open the item and our magnification might go away. Though, we can always bring it back by touching the accessibility button again. Okay, let's tap right here.

And just like that, our switch control has appeared. And now, we'll take one finger to tap on the switch control button to switch from full screen to part of the screen.

Great. Now we notice that the magnification highlight has switched to a smaller area. Kind of like the lens on a magnifying glass. To move the magnifying lens around the screen, there's a control in the bottom right corner of the square. So, we'll just place and hold one finger on the control so we can move the lens around, and we can magnify things in different areas of the screen.

The lens can be useful for zooming in on different parts of the screen while still viewing the full screen and that's really handy for checking out details that might be too small to see. Isn't that great?

Now when we're done using magnification there's just one more step. We'll use the accessibility button shortcut to stop magnification. We can move to the navigation bar at the bottom of our screen and tap on the accessibility button.

Now, magnification has turned off. To quickly turn it back on when we want it, we can tap the accessibility button again, and when we turn magnification back on, it opens up the same way we left it, either full screen or partial screen.

Now you know how to quickly access screen magnification and how to switch between full and partial screen. Be sure to check out the rest of this series to learn even more handy tips on magnification and other features too. Thanks for learning with me today. Until next time.