Android Low Vision: Magnify Full Screen and Quick Zoom with Triple Tap

Today, we're going to check out the magnification triple-tap feature. This is a built-in feature that lets us use a quick gesture to zoom in on the screen so we can make things larger and easier to see.

Triple-tap can be really handy if you don't want to look for the accessibility button on the screen. Let's find out how it works.

Our first step is to set up magnification. To do that, we'll head over to our Settings app, which is right here on our home screen. We'll just tap on Settings to open it.

Our magnification settings are in the Accessibility settings so let's find our Accessibility button in this list of options. We'll just scroll down and here it is. We'll tap right here on Accessibility.

On this screen, we can scroll through all our accessibility features. Let's look under the Display heading, and in the list of options we'll find Magnification. This is where we can set up our triple-tap shortcut, so let's just touch right here on our Magnification button to open the Magnification settings.

Got it. Now, we'll scroll down again to look at the choices under the Options heading. Here, we'll find Magnification shortcut and Magnification type. Also, toward the bottom of the screen, we have instructions on how to zoom in and how to zoom in temporarily. We'll get into how these options work in just a bit. For now, let's focus on selecting our shortcut.

To select our shortcut, first we'll tap right here on the name of the button, which is Magnification shortcut. We're tapping on the name and not the toggle switch because the toggle switch will set up magnification with certain defaults, but we want to explore the different options.

For the shortcut, we can see there's more than one option to choose from. Two of the options are the accessibility button or volume keys, and if you'd like to learn how magnification works with the accessibility button, check out a few of the other workshops in this series. But let's keep scrolling down until we find an option that says Advanced and it has a down arrow. This is where our triple-tap shortcut will be, so we'll just tap right here on Advanced, and there it is: Triple-tap screen.

This shortcut will allow us to quickly tap on the screen three times with one finger to magnify what's displayed. Because we have more than one shortcut option, we can actually set one or all of the shortcuts to access magnification, but for this workshop, we're just going to select Triple-tap screen. So, we'll touch the checkbox to select it and then tap on the Save button down at the bottom right corner of our screen to set it.

There we go. Our magnification shortcut has been set and the magnification accessibility feature is ready for us to use. On this screen, we can see the dot inside the toggle switch has moved from left to right. This tells us that magnification is ready in the background. And under Magnification shortcut, it says Triple-tap screen.

Now let's set our magnification type to choose how we want to magnify. To choose our magnification type, we'll tap on the Magnification type button. This opens another screen where we have a few choices. We can choose full screen or part of screen, and as we scroll down a bit further, we can choose Switch between full and partial screen. For this workshop, let's scroll back to the top and we'll touch the button to select Magnify full screen.

Now, depending on how your phone is set up, you might get a popup on your screen asking if you'd like to change your magnification shortcut. This happens because with our triple-tap feature, the phone will be just a bit slower to respond when we touch or tap the screen once. It's waiting to see whether there will be three taps before it reacts. This short delay isn't a big deal though, so let's just select Continue anyway at the bottom-right corner of our screen.

Okay, now we're back on our previous screen and full screen has been selected. That's great; we've set up our magnification shortcut and magnification type. Now, let's see how magnification works using our shortcut within an app.

So, we'll go to our home screen. To do this, we'll move down to the bottom of the screen to find our home button, which is right in the center of our navigation bar, or if your phone is set up to use gestures swipe up with one finger from the bottom of the screen to get to the home screen. For more info on gesture navigation or to switch from gesture navigation to the navigation bar, see the resources by scrolling down below this workshop. On this phone, we'll tap our home button inside the navigation bar.

Now, we're on our home screen. Let's move to the bottom of the screen and swipe up with one finger to open our list of apps. Great, here they are. And now, let's find our Chrome app which on this phone is right here at the top in our list of commonly used apps. We'll tap on it to open it.

Now that Chrome is open, let's quickly triple-tap with one finger on the screen to turn on magnification. The keyword here is quickly, so we'll tap, tap, tap.

Great, our magnification has been turned on. We notice that the content on the screen has enlarged. This is a clue that lets us know magnification is turned on. Using the triple-tap lets us quickly zoom in and out on the screen.

So to zoom out, we just tap, tap, tap once more, and to turn magnification back on, you guessed it, we'll triple-tap again. And it's helpful to know that where we tap on the screen matters. The place where we triple-tap will become the focus of our magnified screen; so, let's triple-tap right here, and that moves toward the center of our screen.

Now that our entire screen is magnified, we need to be able to pan or move around the screen to see what else is there. To do this, we're going to take two fingers and drag them up and down and left and right to move around the screen. This gesture is the two-finger drag, so let's try it.

We'll place two fingers on our screen with a space between them about a half an inch. Without a space between our fingers, the device may think we're touching the screen with one big finger.

So, let's explore our screen using the two-finger drag like this. While we're zoomed in, we can also adjust the magnification, and to do that we'll use our thumb and index finger, this time in a pinching gesture. We'll place our thumb and index finger together on the screen and slide them outward to increase magnification. Let's try to zoom in as much as we can.

Wow, that really zoomed in quite a bit. The magnification level goes up to eight times. We also notice that the more we zoom in, the less of the screen we can see.

Now, let's try decreasing the magnification. We'll take our thumb and index finger once more and gradually slide them back together like this. As we decrease the magnification, we can see more of our screen. Once we get our magnification where we want it, we can lift our fingers to leave that setting and this will be our default magnification for next time.

Next, to scroll up and down on the screen, we'll just use one finger. Yes, we can use the two-finger drag to move up and down, but that will keep us in the same section of the screen. To scroll up or down to another part of the screen, we'll need to use the one-finger swipe gesture. Let's try it.

So, we'll place one finger on our screen and swipe up to scroll. Then, we'll swipe down. When we get to the section we want, we can explore this area of the screen with our two-finger drag, and once again we'll use the triple-tap shortcut to stop magnification. So, we'll just quickly tap, tap tap.

Okay, we noticed that our magnification has turned off. So far, we've set our magnification shortcut and type and we've magnified in full screen.

Next, we're going to learn how to zoom in temporarily. Sometimes we want to quickly zoom in on our screen and then have magnification turn off as soon as we're done. To use this Quick Zoom feature, we need our magnification on full screen, which we already have.

To turn on Quick Zoom, we'll triple-tap, but this time we'll hold our finger on the screen with the third tap like this. Now we notice that the screen has enlarged. With our finger still placed on the screen, let's drag our finger around to view what's on the screen. As we continue to drag our finger around, the screen stays enlarged, and once we're done viewing things while we're zoomed in, we'll just lift our finger to zoom out. Now our screen is no longer magnified. Isn't that great?

This built-in accessibility feature really is handy when we need a bit more magnification for just a moment. We've learned several ways to magnify things on our screen and getting used to these gestures can be awkward at first, but once we practice them, it really is surprising how quickly they become second nature. Thanks for learning with me today. Until next time.