iPhone/iPad VoiceOver: Home Button Gestures

Douglas: Hello, my name is Douglas Walker. Today we'll be checking out how to get the most out of our home button. We'll use our home button if we want to start Siri, launch our app switcher, open our accessibility shortcuts, and close any of our open apps.

We'll also take a look at some really great gestures that we'll use for opening our control center and getting to all of our notifications. This might seem like a lot and it is, however the more we use our home button and home button gestures, the more we'll find that all of this will soon become second nature. So let's jump right in and check it all out.

Today we will be using our iPhone, but no worries because all of this will work pretty much the same whether we're using our iPhone or our iPad. How about we begin with Siri?

Now Apple likes to call Siri our personal assistant. And how do we launch Siri? Well, we could just say, "Hey, Siri." Right? However, we can also just hold down our home button. Our home button is our small round button here near the bottom center of our iPhone. Let's do it.

We'll just hold down our home button until we hear our Siri audio cue, which will sound like a little ding. Then we'll just give Siri our request. And when we're done, we'll just release our home button. Let's give it a try. We'll hold out our home button, What's the weather today?

Siri: The forecast is calling for thunderstorms today. Daytime temperatures will hover around 72 degrees with overnight lows around 54 degrees.

Douglas: All right, and there you go. You've gotta love Siri, right? All right. Our Siri screen is open or visible. How do we close our Siri screen? Well, this brings up probably the thing we'll use our home button for the most. We just press our home button one time to close any of our open apps, or to dismiss any pop-up menu. We'll press our home button one time and we'll close our Siri screen here. So we'll just press our home button.

Voiceover: Notes.

Douglas: Great, our Siri screen has closed, and we've been placed right back on our home screen. Like I said, we'll use our single press a lot. It will instantly close any open app, and place us right back on our home screen. Let's say we want to get to our app switcher to check out all of our recently opened apps. Well, quickly pressing our home button twice will open our app switcher. Let's give it a try. We'll just press twice quickly.

Voiceover: App switcher, Settings, Active.

Douglas: Great, our app switcher has opened. We could just swipe through it and check out all of the apps that we've recently been using, which is really cool. But let's say that we just wanna close our app switcher. Well, you guessed it, we'll just press our home button one time. So we'll just press it here.

Voiceover: Notes.

Douglas: Great, our app switcher is closed, and we're right back on our home screen. Let's check out how to launch our accessibility shortcuts. Now, if we're not yet familiar with our accessibility shortcuts, our accessibility shortcuts give us a really great way to quickly turn on and off some of the most frequently used accessibility features. We won't be covering how to set that up today. But we just so happen to have an Apple workshop called "Setting Shortcuts," that walks us right through exactly how to set up our shortcuts.

So you're really gonna want to check that one out. Okay, if we want to open our accessibility shortcuts it'll probably come as no surprise that we'll just press our home button three times. If we've only set one accessibility shortcut, pressing our home button three times, will just turn on and off the one accessibility feature we've set. We'll wanna keep that in mind. Okay, let's do it. We'll just press our home button three times.

Voiceover: Alert accessibility shortcuts.

Douglas: Our accessibility shortcuts are now open. That is pretty great. Okay, we'll close our accessibility shortcuts by just touching our cancel button near the bottom of our screen here. So we'll just touch that first.

Voiceover: Cancel button.

Douglas: And we'll go ahead and just double tap.

Voiceover: Notes.

Douglas: All right, our accessibility shortcuts have closed, and we're back on our home screen. And there you go, that pretty much covers our home button. but we do have a couple of gestures they're gonna come in really, really handy. We have our control center gesture and our gesture for opening our notifications. First, we'll check out how to open our control center. We'll begin by touching our status bar, across the very top edge of our screen. If we have our hints turned on, voiceover will give us some really great information, when we touch our status bar. Let's go ahead and touch up in our status bar here and touch near the top edge of our screen.

Voiceover: 6:32 PM, button, status bar item. Swipe down with three fingers to reveal notifications. Swipe up with three fingers to reveal the control center. Double tap to scroll to top.

Douglas: Great, first, we heard our time announced there, heard a lot of stuff. And then we were given some really great hints. We heard voiceover tell us that we could swipe up our screen with three fingers to reveal our control center. So how about we do just that? We'll just swipe up our screen using three fingers and we'll just swipe here.

Voiceover: Control center. Airplane mode, switch button, off.

Douglas: Great, our control center is now open and we could begin just swiping our way through all of our items here. It'll probably come as no surprise, that we'll press our home button to quickly close our control center. So we'll just go ahead and press our home button here.

Voiceover: Notes.

Douglas: All right, our control center is now closed. And last but not least, let's take a look at how to open our notification center. Opening our notifications will be very similar to open our control center. First, we'll touch back up in our status bar here at the very top of our screen. Let's do it, we'll go ahead and just touch there.

Voiceover: 6:36 PM, button, status bar item. Swipe down with three fingers to reveal notifications. Swipe up with three fingers to reveal the control center. double top to scroll to top.

Douglas: And there's our great hints again. So instead of swiping up with three fingers we'll swipe down with three fingers instead, to open our notifications. So let's do it. We'll just, three fingers swipe down.

Voiceover: Notification center, 6:38 PM.

Douglas: That's pretty cool. Our notifications are all open, and we can just left and right swipe to check them all out here. All right, So we'll just press our home button one more time to close our notifications. So we'll just press that here.

Voiceover: Notes.

Douglas: Yeah, our notifications have closed. We're right back on our home screen. There you go. That pretty much covers all of our home button gestures. I was a bit nervous when I heard Apple was removing the home button on some of their devices. However, I'm so thrilled that Apple decided to keep the home button for those of us that really love using it. Again, my name is Douglas Walker. Take care, and I'll see you next time.