iPhone/iPad Low Vision: Beginning Zoom Gestures

Hello my name is Douglas Walker. Today, we will check out our beginning zoom gestures. Now if we're not yet familiar with zoom, well, zoom is our enlargement software. That's built right into our iPhone, our iPad, and even our iPod touch. Yeah with zoom, we are able to magnify or enlarge anything that's on our screen. And I tell you that really is super fantastic. So let's jump right in and see how our zoom gestures work.

All right first things first, we will need to turn zoom on. Now we'll find our zoom settings in our Settings app and our Settings app is right here on our home screen. So we'll just touch our Settings app.

Great our Settings have opened and we have been given two lists. Now we'll find our zoom settings within our Accessibility settings. So, we will look for Accessibility here in our left list. And there it is. So we'll just tap it.

Yeah, our Accessibility button is now highlighted and we noticed that all of our Accessibility settings have opened here in our right list. Now our zoom setting is the second item here in our list. So, we'll just tap our zoom button to open all of our zoom settings.

Yeah, our zoom settings are open and at the very top of our zoom settings, we will see our On, Off switch. And of course we see that zoom is currently turned off. So we'll just tap to turn it on.

All right our screen is now magnified. And how great is that? Okay we have been given a couple of beginning zoom gestures here that will help us quickly get up and running. So let's start by checking out our beginning gestures.

Now our first instruction tells us that we can double tap three fingers to zoom. Yeah, this is how we're able to jump or toggle in and out of zoom. And this is really handy if maybe we want to quickly see our entire screen and then quickly magnify it again. So let's take a look at how this works.

We'll just tap our screen twice with three fingers. Now we'll want to leave just a little space between each of our fingers. Otherwise, our device will see our three fingers. It's just one big finger and we don't want that. So, let's give it a try.

We'll just tap our screen twice with three fingers. Okay we can see that we've zoomed out and that our entire screen is visible. Okay now all we need to do to zoom back in is tap twice again with three fingers. So, we'll just tap twice. Great and our screen is now magnified again and hey there you go. Okay, how about we check out our next instruction?

All right our next gesture tells us that we can drag with three fingers to move around our screen. We simply use three fingers. Now, remember we need to leave just a bit of room between each one of our fingers, and then we'll just kind of drag our three fingers across our screen. It's almost as if we're just pulling our screen around and that is pretty cool.

All right let's take a look at our last and final gesture here. Okay we are told that we can double tap with three fingers and drag to change our zoom size. Yeah, this gesture gives us the ability to change the size of our screens magnification. Now this gesture might take a bit of practice at first, but it really is super useful. Okay this is just like our three-finger double tap. Only on our second tap We're going to leave our fingers on our screen. So, let's go ahead and give it a try.

We'll just double tap and hold. All right we've tapped our screen with three fingers and our fingers are still on our screen. And as we drag or slide our fingers up our screen, we noticed that our text begins to enlarge. Yeah, we'll leave our fingers on our screen and just slide our fingers down to decrease our magnification. Now, when we get the text size just where we like it, we simply lift our three fingers and there you go.

This is now our default magnification. And now as we move or drag around our screen, we noticed that all of our text size remains the same size. And if we use our three-finger double tap to move in and out of zoom, we see that our current magnification will be our default.

You know, our double tap and drag really is a great gesture because at any time we're able to quickly change our magnification size. All right that pretty much covers all of our beginning zoom gestures.

Yeah, it really is amazing that just three simple gestures really do help us quickly begin moving through our device. Again, my name is Douglas Walker, take care and I'll see you next time.