Apple TV: Zoom Magnification Basics

Hello, my name is Douglas Walker. Today we will check out our Apple TV's zoom feature. Now, if we're not yet familiar with zoom, well zoom is our magnification software that is built right in to Apple's operating system. And with zoom, we're able to magnify anything on our Apple TV screen, which really is super great for us.

All right. First, we'll begin by checking out how we turn on our zoom feature and we'll need to head to our settings app to do this. Okay, our settings app is right here on our desktop, so we'll just flick to our settings here. And we'll just press.

Great. Our settings app has opened and we've been presented with a list with all of our Apple TV settings. Now, we'll need to navigate to our accessibility settings to turn on our zoom setting. And our accessibility settings are under our general settings and our general settings are already highlighted here at the very top of our list, so we'll just go ahead and press our touch surface here.

Great, our general settings have opened. So, we'll just swipe down until we find our accessibility buttons. So, we'll just swipe down a few times here. All right, here we are right on our accessibility button, so we'll just press. Okay, here we are in all of our accessibility settings. Yes, so we'll just go ahead and flick down until we find zoom here. And we'll just flick down. All right, here is our zoom button. And we'll just press it here. And we'll press.

Okay. Finally, right? Our zoom settings are opened and we can simply press our zoom button here to turn on zoom. And it's exactly what we want, so we'll go ahead and just press our touch surface.

All right, we have turned on zoom. Yeah. We can see that our screen has been instantly magnified which is super cool, right? Now, we've been given some beginning zoom instructions here. However, they can be just a bit confusing if we happen to be new to our Apple TV, so we just press our menu button here to move back to our home screen. And we'll discuss not only these gestures but some other really useful tips for helping us to get the most out of our zoom magnification feature.

So, we'll just press our menu button here and we'll press. And here we are back in our settings, so we'll just press our menu button again. And again. And one more time here. Yeah, we are back on our home screen, and our screen here is still magnified. Now, it's really good to know that we can easily toggle our zoom magnification off and on at any time, and we can do this by pressing our touch surface three times. And we'll need to do this kind of quickly, so how about we give it a try. We'll press three times quickly here, and we'll just tap three times.

Great, and now our entire screen is visible. Now, our entire screen is visible. Now, our zoom feature is still running in the background so we can simply just press our touch surface three more times to turn our zoom right back on. And so, we'll just press here again. All right, and our screen is magnified again which is really great.

All right. We'll use our standard flick gestures to totally navigate our Apple TV screen. And of course, we'll simply just flick around on our Siri remote touch surface to do this. So, we can just flick around a bit here and check it out. So, we'll just flick to the right. And up. All around here. And its pretty great. Everything stays magnified for us.

You know, and that's pretty cool, but you know, what if our magnification level needs to be increased or even decreased just a bit? Well, we can quickly change our zoom magnification level with our two finger double tap and drag gesture. Now, this gesture might take a bit of practice at first, but it is super useful.

Now, we'll simply tap our Siri remote touch surface, and we'll tap it twice quickly with two fingers. Only, we're gonna hold down on our second tap. So, let's go ahead and give it a try here. And we'll just double tap and hold here. And we'll double tap and hold. And we double tapped and held. And now, as we push our fingers up our touch surface, remember our two fingers are still on our surface, we notice that our text will begin to enlarge here. And you know, of course we're leaving our fingers on our screen and we'll pull down of course to decrease our magnification like that.

And now, we can push up and down, and we still have our two fingers here, and when we get our text that's about where we like it here, we simply just lift our two fingers from our touch surface. And this is now our default magnification. And now, as we move or kind of flick around on our screen here, we notice that all of our text size is gonna stay the same. You know, our double tap and drag really is a great gesture for us because at any time we're able to quickly change our magnification size.

Now, what if we wanna view an area on our screen or a place on our screen without the ability to flip to it? Well, we also have what Apple calls our zoom drag mode. Now, our gesture for turning on zoom drag is actually a two finger tap gesture. And we'll simple tap our touch surface here quickly with two fingers and we'll toggle our zoom drag on and off.

Okay, so let's go ahead and do that. We'll just two finger tap our touch surface here three times. And we'll just triple tap here. We'll do that. Okay, we've turned on our zoom drag gesture, and now when we just slide or kind of drag our finger around on our screen, we have the ability to pan or move in any direction on our screen. So, there you go. We're just dragging around with our thumb on our touch surface here which is pretty cool.

Okay, so now that we have zoom drag turned on, the way that we move between items on our screen has changed just a bit. Instead of flicking between items on our screen, we'll need to touch near the side or the edge of our touch surface in which we wanna move. So, if we wanna move to the next item to our right, we'll simple touch to the right side of our touch surface. And how about we do just that? We'll just touch the right side of our surface here. And we'll touch.

Yeah, so each time I touch to the right, we move to the right. And of course if I touch to the left, we move back to the left here. And of course, I can touch to the lower side of my touch surface here and move down. And of course, the upper side or edge, and move back up there. And there you go. Now, our zoom drag gesture can really come in handy, especially if we have to have some text on our screen that we need to drag to in order to read it here. That's pretty cool.

All right, our last zoom feature that we wanna check out today is our zoom speak feature. Now, zoom speak is really super easy to navigate or to activate. And I tell you, this really is a feature that I find myself using all the time. Now, activating our zoom speak feature will speak the text for our active item. And of course, we activate our zoom speak feature by simply pressing our Siri button twice. So, how about let's try it. We'll just press our Siri button here twice. And we'll tap it twice here.

Speaker 2: Row one. Column one.

Douglas Walker: All right, our item's text, of course, we heard was read aloud to us, and that's pretty great. You know, zoom speak really is a nice feature and can be a huge help to reduce our eye fatigue. I'll tell you, it's pretty easy to see how our zoom features make it so much easier for totally accessing our Apple TV.

Again, my name is Douglas Walker. Take care, and I'll see you next time.