Apple Watch: Rotor

Douglas Walker: Hello, my name is Douglas Walker. Today, we'll be looking at using our rotor gesture. You know, the rotor is probably my favorite gesture because it makes it so much easier to move through our text by characters, words, or even headings. Our rotor also lets us do some really cool things like adjust our voiceover speech rate as well as our watch volume. Yeah, there's a ton of stuff packed in our rotor.

Now, before we get started, we'll want to make sure that our voiceover setting is turned on, and the easiest way to turn on voiceover is in our Apple Watch app, on our iPhone down, in our accessibility settings. So let's jump right in and check out our rotor. All right, so how do we get to our rotor? Well, we have our rotor gesture. Now, it really helps to think of our rotor gesture, like maybe the same motion we would use when we open a bottle or a soft drink cap. Now, we'll need to place two of our fingers on our screen. It doesn't matter which two fingers we use, however, most people seem to prefer using their thumb and index fingers. So to begin using our rotor, we'll just place our two fingers on our screen, and then we'll just rotate them clockwise to move forward through our rotor items.

VoiceOver: "Characters," "Words," "Speaking Rate," 50%.

Douglas: Yeah, and we'll rotate our two fingers counterclockwise if we want to move backwards through our items.

VoiceOver: "Words," "Characters," "Actions," "Activate."

Douglas: Okay, and we just lifted our fingers from our screen here. Okay, how about we check out how to get the most from our rotor by moving through some text in our notifications? Yeah, we'll, just two fingers swipe down to open our notification center.

VoiceOver: Notification Center. Amazon. "Delivered."

Douglas: Great, our notifications are open and we're on our Amazon Notification. Who would've thought it, right? Anyway, let's say we would like to move through our Amazon notification through characters. We first need to move through our rotor and find our characters item. So let's do it. We'll move through our rotor.

VoiceOver: "Characters."

Douglas: Great, and now that we have our characters selected, each time we swipe down our screen, we'll move forward by characters. And if we want to move to our previous character, we'll just swipe up our screen. Great, so let's go ahead and swipe down our screen a couple of times and we'll just swipe.

VoiceOver: Cap A-M-A-Z-O-N.

Douglas: And of course, we can move to our previous characters by swiping up.

VoiceOver: N-O-Z-A-M cap A.

Douglas: Now, it can be really easy to get lost in our text when removing one character at a time. So how about we check out how to move by words? And you guessed that to do this, we'll need to move through our rotor and select our word items. So let's go ahead and do that.

VoiceOver: "Words."

Douglas: Okay, we've selected our words, and now we can just swipe down and up our screen to move through our notification by words. So let's go ahead and move through a couple of words here and we'll just swipe down.

VoiceOver: Amazon. "Delivered - Tell us how we did!."

Douglas: Yeah, so we can move back through our words here by swiping up.

VoiceOver: Did, we, how, us, tell, -, delivered. Amazon.

Douglas: Yeah. And I'll be the first to admit that it does take a little practice to totally get the hang of it. Now, this is how we'll move through our text in any app that has the text area, such as an email or even in a text message. It's also great to know that our rotor gives us the ability to move through a text area or website by headings, which can be super handy as well. Okay, let's move back to our watch base and we'll just press our digital crown.

VoiceOver: 3:11 PM.

Douglas: All right, we're back on our watch base. Now, we probably noticed that there were a lot of other items in our rotor, so how about we quickly take a look at a couple of my favorites? Okay, the first of these is our speaking rate. So let's move to our speaking rate item.

VoiceOver: "Characters," "Words," "Speaking rate," 50%.

Douglas: Okay. We have our speaking rate selected. So now we can just swipe up our screen to increase our speech rate, and we'll do just that. Let's do that a couple of times here.

VoiceOver: 55%, 60%, 65%, 70%.

Douglas: And we can just swipe down our screen to slow our speech back down. So we'll swipe down a couple of times.

VoiceOver: 65%, 60%, 55%, 50%.

Douglas: Yeah. And that's really great. Okay. It's good to know that 50% is our default speech rate. All right, another great feature is the ability to turn our watches volume up and down. I mean, it can be really difficult to hear our watch at times, especially if we're in a noisy restaurant or traveling outside near traffic. So let's go ahead and do it. We'll use our rotor to move to our volume item.

VoiceOver: "Volume," 85%.

Douglas: Yeah, there's our volume. And you got it. We'll swipe up our screen to increase our volume, and we'll just swipe up a couple of times here.

VoiceOver: 90%, 95%, 100%.

Douglas: And of course, we'll just swipe down to turn our volume back down, and we'll do just that.

VoiceOver: 95%, 90%, 85%.

Douglas: Yeah, I tell you, it's super nice to have our speaking rate and our volume controls right at our fingertips. And hey, there you go. That pretty much covers all of the great features that we'll find in our rotor. I tell you our rotor gesture is a great feature and can really help when we want to move to our text, turn up and down our volume, and even adjust our speaking rate. Again, my name is Douglas Walker. Take care, and I'll see you next time.