iPhone/iPad VoiceOver: 2 Finger Gestures

Douglas: Hello, my name is Douglas Walker. Today, we'll be checking out our two-finger gestures. And to perform our two-finger gestures, we need to, of course, use two fingers. Yeah, our fingers need to be separated by about 1/2 an inch. You know, a good rule of thumb is that we can actually stick our thumb between our two fingers. All right, how about we jump right in and check out all of our two-finger gestures?

All right, how about we start with our two-finger single tap? Now, this is a really handy gesture that we'll use to pause and then continue the playback of voiceover. So, let's take a look at how to do this while reading a book.

Now, our Books app is open, and we're in the book, "Call of the Wild." Okay, once we get our book reading, we can tap once with two fingers to pause voiceover, and then we just tap once again with two fingers to get voiceover speaking, or in this case, reading again. So, let's go ahead and get our speech started.

Now, we'll discuss the gesture for getting voiceover reading in just a bit, but first, we'll learn how to pause and resume voiceover. So let's do it. Let's get voiceover reading here.

VoiceOver: "The Call of the Wild." Close button. Chapter one heading, embellishment image, "Into the Primitive" heading. Old longings nomadic lea, chafing at custom's chain. Again, from its brumal.

Douglas: And we just tapped once with two fingers to pause voiceover, and now we can do our two-finger single tap to get it going again. So, we'll just tap the screen once with two fingers.

VoiceOver: Sleep wakens the ferine strain. Buck did not read the newspapers or he would have known that trouble was brewing.

Douglas: And we just performed another two-finger single tap to pause our speech again. Now, the same gesture will work anytime voiceover is speaking. So, if we're reading an article on the internet, or reading an email, or just swiping through our home screen and we want to silence voiceover, our two-finger single tap gesture will work there as well. Okay, we said just a minute ago that we would discuss how we got our book reading. Well, that brings us to our next two gestures, and these are our two-finger swipe up and our two-finger swipe down gestures. Now, these gestures are really nice if we're on a page that we would like continuously read. And since we already have "Call of the Wild" open, let's check out our two-finger swipe up gesture. Now, a two-finger swipe up gesture will start voiceover reading from the very top of our screen, and everything on our screen is gonna be read. Again, we'll need to have our fingers spread apart by about a 1/2 an inch, and then we'll just swipe up using our two fingers. So let's go ahead and try that. We'll just swipe up with two fingers.

VoiceOver: "The Call of the Wild." Close button. Chapter one heading, embellishment image. "Into the Primitive" heading.

Douglas: And we just use our two-finger single tap to pause voiceover again. Now, our two-finger swipe up is really great, that is if we want everything on our screen to be read from the top. However, our two-finger swipe down is nice because it will actually begin voiceover reading from wherever voiceover is currently focused on our screen, which is really nice if we happen to be maybe at the beginning of an article or at the beginning of an email, and we would like voiceover to begin reading from there. Okay, how about we go ahead and close our book here and check out our next gesture? So we'll just close our book.

VoiceOver: Lift for home. Books.

Douglas: Great, here we are back on our home screen. I'll tell you a really good gesture to know right away is our two-finger double tap. Now, Apple likes to call this gesture our Magic Tap, and I think that's because it does so many great things because with our two-finger double tap, we can do things like answer and hang up our phone calls, we can start and stop video playback, we can begin and end new voicemail recordings, and even start and stop our stopwatch. But my favorite thing that our two-finger gesture will do is it will play and pause our audio apps. So, if we're listening to music or we're using a book playing app, like BARD Mobile, or maybe Voice Stream Reader, our two-finger double tap will start and stop our playback. And this way, we don't have to go searching for our pause and play buttons, which is beyond great. All right, let's check out how our two-finger double tap gesture works. Now, the last audio app that was used was our music app. So, if we perform our two-finger double tap, our album should begin playing, even if we're not in our music app. Okay, so let's go ahead and try our two-finger double tap, and we'll just tap our screen twice with two fingers. Yeah, and we just did another two-finger double tap to pause our audio, and that is super handy. Remember, our device is gonna play the last song or book that we were listening to, so our two-finger double tap is a really great gesture to know. Okay, our next two-finger gesture is our two-finger triple tap. Now, our two-finger triple tap will open or launch our item chooser. And how about we go ahead and do just that? We'll tap our screen three times with our two fingers here, and we'll go ahead and just tap.

VoiceOver: Search field. Double tap to edit.

Douglas: Yeah, our item chooser is open. And of course, our item chooser gives us the ability to search for any item that's on our device. And I'll tell you, I love our item chooser. All right, how about we use our next two-finger gesture here to close our item chooser, and this is our scrub gesture. Now, our scrub gesture does a couple of really great things. The first thing it does is help us to close a pop-up menu, like our item chooser here, and even our Control Center, or any of our notifications. All right, so to perform our scrub gesture, we use two fingers and then we scrub our fingers from left to right across our screen, and then from right to left, and then back from left to right. We kind of have to perform this gesture quickly, and we won't lift our fingers until we finish that third part of the scrub. You know, it's almost like forming the print letter Z on our screen. Okay, so let's go ahead and give it a try. We'll just scrub back and forth here.

VoiceOver: Closing notes.

Douglas: And there you go. Our item chooser has closed and we're back on our home screen. Now, our scrub gesture also gives us the ability to go back to a previous menu or a previous screen. Yeah, so this is really handy. If we're in a settings or in an app and we wanna go back to the previous menu or page, we usually have to go looking for that back button in the top left corner of our screen. However, if we use our scrub gesture, we can quickly go back without having to find that Back button, which is really nice there. All right, how about we use our final two-finger gesture here, and this is our two-finger quadruple tap, and our two-finger quadruple tap will launch or open some of our most frequently used voiceover settings. And this is super handy because this means that we don't have to go digging through all of our settings to find what we need, which is really nice. So, let's go ahead and do it. We'll just quadruple double tap.

VoiceOver: Voiceover settings.

Douglas: Yeah, our voiceover quick settings are open, and we can just swipe through our screen to find things like our speaking rate, the ability to turn on and off our voiceover hints, and even some of our braille settings. So, we're really gonna wanna spend some time checking out our voiceover quick settings here. Now, we have our Done button here in the top right-hand corner of our screen for closing our quick settings. However, this is another great place where we can use our two-finger scrub gesture, so let's go ahead and do it. We'll just two-finger scrub.

VoiceOver: Notes.

- Great, our voiceover quick settings have closed and we're right back on our home screen. And there you go. That pretty much covers all of our two-finger gestures. You know, our two-finger gestures really do so many things, and I'll be the first to admit that it might take a little practice to get 'em all down, but if we just take 'em one at a time, before we knew it, we'll be moving through our device with ease. Again, my name is Douglas Walker. Take care, and I'll see you next time.