iPhone/iPad Low Vision: Magnifiers

Hello, my name's Douglas Walker. Today, we will be looking at how to use our built-in magnifier. Now, our magnifier uses our device's back-facing camera to view images that we can then enlarge on our screen. And I use it for everything from checking the temperature on my thermostat to reading price tags, and even things like reading the items on a menu in a restaurant. I tell you, I really do use my magnifier for just about everything.

Now, we're using our iPad in today's workshop, however, all of this will work pretty much the same whether we're using our iPad or iPhone, or even our iPod touch. So, let's jump right in and check it all out.

To demonstrate all of the features in our magnifier, we will be using our "Hadley Headlines" newsletter. All right, our Magnifier app is right here on our home screen, so we will just tap it to open it up.

Yeah, our Magnifier app has opened. Now, as we can see, our back-facing camera is on and we are seeing an enlarged view of our "Hadley Headlines".

Okay, just below our view area, and at the top of our magnifier features, we have our magnifier adjustable bar and we can easily change our magnification level by touching and dragging the little round bead here on our adjustable bar. And we will drag to the right to increase our magnification, or we can simply drag back to the left to decrease our magnification level, which is really great.

However, it might not be that easy for some of us to see our little bead here. So, Apple has given us a really easy way for changing our magnification level, and this is to simply slide one finger up or down our screen. Yeah, we just slide our finger up our screen to increase our magnification. And of course, we just slide back down to decrease, and that really is super easy.

Okay, we have some really great features just below our zoom adjustable bar. However, if we want to view our entire screen while using our magnifier, we can hide most of these features and we'll do that by just dragging them down on our screen. And of course, we can just drag them back up again if we like. And if we want to hide them completely, we can simply tap our screen twice with one finger. Yeah, and we can just tap twice again to bring our tools right back. And that's pretty cool.

All right, let's go ahead and explore all of our Magnifier features. Okay, the button farthest to our left here is our "switch camera" button. Now, I mentioned earlier that we are using our back-facing camera. Well, our "switch camera" button gives us the ability to switch between our back and our front-facing camera. And if we tap our "switch camera" button, we see that we can tap to choose between our back and our front-facing camera.

I tell you, this can be super handy if we want to use our magnifier as a mirror for, maybe, checking our hair, looking to see if we have something stuck in our teeth, or even putting on makeup. And when we're done, we just tap our "switch camera" button again to hide our back and front buttons.

All right, our next button here is our "Brightness" button, and touching our "Brightness" button will bring up another adjustable bar. Now, we probably already guessed that, if we slide our brightness bead here to our right, our image will become brighter and we can darken our image here by sliding it back to the left. And when we have our brightness right where we like it, we can just tap our "Brightness" button again. And of course, that will close our brightness setting there.

Okay, just to the right of our "Brightness" button, we have been given our "Contrast" button, and just like our "Brightness" button, we can tap to open it and then we can slide our bead to the right to increase our Contrast. And we'll just slide it back to the left to decrease our contrast again. And that is pretty great. And then we'll just tap our "Contrast" button again to hide our contrast setting.

All right, just to the right of our contrast we will find our "Filters" button. You know, the fact that we've been given options for choosing between different color filters means that we'll be able to customize our view areas so that it works just right for us. Okay, we'll just touch our "Filter" button.

Now we currently have no filter. However, as we begin dragging left through our filters here, we see that we have a ton to choose from. Yeah, this is super cool. It really is great that we can find a filter that works just right for us. And of course, when we're done, we just tap our "Filter" button again. And how great is that?

Okay, our button furthest to the right here is our "Flashlight" button. You know, there might be times we're in a dimly lit area and we just don't have enough light to see what's in our view area. Well, that's when our flashlight comes in handy. When we touch our "Flashlight" button, our LED lights for our camera's flash turn on.

Now this could be really great, maybe in a dimly lit store or restaurant, but we don't really need our flashlight right now, so we'll just touch our "Flashlight" button again to turn it back off.

Okay, we have a really big button right here in the bottom-center of our features, and this is our "Freeze Frame" button. Now, our freeze frame actually freezes or captures an image of the object that we're viewing.

All right, we have our "Hadley Headlines" here on our screen. However, I use this feature all of the time for capturing images of price tags, or even receipts that I might need to submit for work, but we'll just go ahead and capture our "Hadley Headlines" today. So, we'll just tap.

Great, we have captured our image. And now that our image has been captured we can just use our pinch gesture to zoom in and out on our image if we like. Yeah, and how cool is that?

Now, we probably noticed that all of our tools disappeared when we started pinching. Well, no worries, because we can simply just tap our screen with one finger to bring them right back.

Okay, we just so happen to have a "Share" button in the top-right corner of our screen. And our "Share" button gives us the ability to share our frozen image by text message, email, or we could even save it to our photo library. Yeah, this is actually one of my favorite features.

Okay, we still have our captured image here and we can just tap our "Freeze Frame" button again to unfreeze and clear our image. Yeah, our captured image has cleared.

Now, we do have two more buttons that we're gonna briefly talk about. We have our "Settings" button here in the bottom-left corner of our features. And if we open our Settings, we are able to totally customize our magnifier by adding or removing any of our buttons or features if we like.

Now, there is one setting here that I want to briefly mention, and this is "People Detection". That's right. Our device can actually tell us if there are people around us and even tell us how far away they are, which, you know, is super great for social distancing. Now, if you want to learn more about "People Detection", you'll want to check out our resource area for this workshop.

Okay, when we're finished here in our Settings, we'll just touch our "Done" button here in the top-right corner of our Settings menu.

All right, last but not least, we have our "Multi-Photo" button here in the bottom-right corner of our features. And our "Multi-Photo" button gives us the ability to freeze or capture more than one image at a time. Now, we aren't gonna have time in today's workshop to fully explore our multi-photo feature, but this can be super handy if we want to capture multiple receipts, or maybe we want to compare different price tags. And when we're finished, we simply tap our "End" button in the top-left corner of our screen. Yeah, and there you go. That pretty much covers all of our Magnifier features.

You know, we really have been given such a great built-in magnifier with tons of features that give us so much control of exactly how we want to view, I tell you, just about anything. Again, my name is Douglas Walker. Take care, and I'll see you next time.