iPhone/iPad Low Vision: Setting Accessibility Shortcuts

Hello, my name is Douglas Walker. Today, we are going to be taking a look at a really simple way for quickly turning on and off some of our most frequently used accessibility features. And we will do this by setting up our accessibility shortcut.

Now, once we set up our accessibility shortcut, we can simply just press our power, or side button three times. Unless we happen to have a device with a home button, then we'll just press our home button three times instead. And this will quickly turn our favorite accessibility features on and off.

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, our iPhone or even our iPod Touch. Alright, our accessibility shortcut setting is currently turned off. So let's take a quick look at how to set it all up.

Now we will turn on our accessibility shortcuts from within 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, our accessibility shortcuts setting is 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. All right, our accessibility shortcut setting is almost the very last setting here in our accessibility list. So, we'll just go ahead, scroll through our list here to find it and at the very bottom here. Yeah, there it is. Okay, we'll go ahead and just tap to open it.

Yeah, our accessibility shortcut settings have opened here in our right list. Now, our accessibility shortcut settings is a list of accessibility options. And like we said, the items that we select here can quickly be turned on and off when we triple press our power or side button or if our device happens to have a home button, we would triple press that instead.

Now, our magnifier is something that I use all of the time and if you're not yet familiar with our built-in magnifier, well, we just so happen to have a magnifier workshop. I know. Who would thought it. Anyway, you're really going to want to check that workshop out.

All right, magnifier is one of the items here in our list so let's go ahead and just touch magnifier here. Yeah, we know for sure that our magnifier is selected because we now have a little check mark just to the left of our magnifier option.

Now we could continue to select other options and add them to our accessibility shortcuts. Yeah, we have other things here like Zoom, Smart Invert and even Voiceover, which is pretty cool. However, let's just keep it simple today. And now that we have magnifier selected, let's go ahead and give it a try.

We will just triple press our power or home button and we will be able to quickly open our magnifier. So we'll go ahead and just press.

Wow, that was fast. Our magnifier has opened and hey, we are good to go. All right, that pretty much covers how to set up our accessibility shortcut.

You know, it really is fantastic that we have been given a super, simple way for quickly turning off some of our favorite accessibility features. Again, my name is Douglas Walker. Take care and I'll see you next time.