Android Low Vision: Magnify with Accessibility Button

Today, we're going to check out the full screen magnification feature using the accessibility button. This 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. There's more than one way to magnify the screen with our Android device and some of the other workshops in this series can help you learn more. The method we're focusing on here lets us get to the full screen magnification feature on any screen. Let's find out how it works.

First, we'll start by setting up magnification. We can find magnification within our Settings app. So, let's head over to settings which is right here on the home screen. We'll tap on it to open it.

There! Now that the settings app is open, we'll find magnification in the accessibility settings. Let's find the accessibility button in this list of options. We'll just scroll down. And here it is! We'll tap right here on Accessibility.

That's it! Under the Display heading, we find a list of options, and here's Magnification. This is where we'll set up our shortcut to use the accessibility button to zoom in on our screen. So, let's just touch right here on the Magnification button to open the magnification settings.

Now, under the Options heading, we find Magnification shortcut and Magnification type. We're going to select Magnification shortcut and we'll just tap right here on the name of the button. We're tapping on the name and not the toggle switch because the toggle switch will only turn the magnification setting on or off. But we want to take a look at the different options.

So, we tapped on the button and we notice on this screen there's more than one shortcut option to choose from. We can choose the Accessibility button or we can scroll down to find the volume keys. We can set one or all of the shortcuts to access magnification but today, we'll just select Tap accessibility button. So, we'll scroll back up to the top of our list of shortcuts and just touch the checkbox to select it.

Now below the text for Tap accessibility button, we'll find a button for more options. This is where we can go to make changes to our accessibility button. We can decide whether to have it in the navigation bar or floating on the screen over our other apps. By default, the accessibility button is a small floating button on the screen. On this phone, the location has been set to the navigation bar which is along the bottom edge of our screen. Inside the navigation bar, the accessibility button appears at the bottom right corner of the screen.

To learn more about how to make changes to the accessibility button, check out the resources. You can find the resources tab by scrolling down the page below this workshop.

Okay, now that we have our shortcut selected, let's save our selection. And we'll do that by tapping on the Save button down toward the bottom right corner of the screen.

There! Our magnification shortcut has been set. And the magnification accessibility feature has now been set up. The circle inside the toggle switch has moved from left to right, which tells us that magnification is running in the background.

Now let's check out Magnification type. This lets us choose how we want to magnify the screen. We can magnify in full screen or part of the screen or we can switch between full and partial screen. For this workshop, we're going to magnify in full screen. To choose our magnification type, we'll tap on the Magnification type button.

This opens another screen that lists the magnification type options. Under the heading, "Choose how to magnify," we have the options of Magnify full screen and Magnify part of screen. And when we scroll down a bit further, we have the option to Switch between full and partial screen. So let's scroll back up and touch the button to select Magnify full screen. Then we'll tap the Save button down at the bottom right corner.

Got it. Now we've set our Magnification shortcut and Magnification type, and it's ready for us to use. So let's see how magnification works within an app using our shortcut.

We'll start by going to our home screen. To do this, we'll move down to the bottom of the screen to find the home button which is right in the center of our navigation bar. Or if you like to use gestures, swipe up with one finger from the bottom of the screen to get to the home screen. See the resources below for more information on just your navigation or how to switch from just your navigation to the navigation bar. Let's go ahead and tap the home button inside the navigation bar.

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.

Here they are! And next, let's find the Chrome app. On this phone, it's right here at the top in the list of Commonly used apps. On your phone, it might be in a different place. We'll tap on it to open it.

Now that Chrome is open, let's tap on the accessibility button to turn on magnification. Earlier, we set up the accessibility button to be in the bottom right corner of the screen within the navigation bar, so we'll tap it here.

Okay, our magnification has been turned on. Now we have a couple of options. We can zoom in temporarily and you can learn about that feature in our workshop on Quick Zoom.

For this workshop, we're going to enlarge our text and graphics so they'll stay magnified until we're done. To do that, we'll just tap the screen. And there, now our entire screen is magnified.

Next, we need to be able to pan or move around the screen to see what's there. To do this, we'll 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. And when we do this, it's important to leave a space between our two fingers. Otherwise, the device may think that we're just using one finger. So let's explore our screen using the two-finger drag.

We've zoomed in on the text and images inside of the Chrome app and now we can move around the screen in any direction. We can also adjust the amount of magnification. To do this, we'll use our thumb and index finger and this time we'll do a pinching gesture.

Let's start by placing our thumb and index finger together on the screen and gradually sliding them apart to increase the 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 decrease the magnification. We'll take our thumb and index finger once more and gradually slide them back together.

Now we've decreased the magnification and we can see more of our screen. If there's a certain level of magnification we like to use, that's great, we can set it. And the next time we open magnification, it'll be right at that same level.

To scroll up and down on the screen, we'll just use one finger. We can use the two-finger drag to move up and down but that keeps us in a limited section of the screen. To scroll up or down to a different area, we'll need to use the one-finger swipe gesture. Let's try it.

We'll just place one finger on our screen and swipe up to scroll. Then we'll swipe down. And when we get to the section of the screen that we want to explore, we'll use our two-finger drag to move around.

Now there's just one more thing. When we're done using magnification, we'll use the accessibility button shortcut to stop magnification. So, we'll just move to the bottom of our screen to the navigation bar and tap on the accessibility button.

Okay, we notice that our magnification has turned off. And to quickly turn it back on, we can tap the accessibility button again. Very cool.

So, let's quickly recap. So far, we've set our Magnification shortcut and Magnification type, and we've magnified in full screen. Be sure to check out the rest of this series to learn additional tips on magnification in partial screen and more. Thanks for learning with me today. Until next time.