iPhone/iPad VoiceOver: Rotor Gesture

Douglas: Hello, my name is Douglas Walker. Today we'll be looking at using a rotor gesture. You know, the rotor is probably my favorite gesture because it makes it possible for us to move through our text by characters, words, and lines, and even web items such as headings, links, and form fields. Yeah, you gotta love the rotor. So let's jump right in and check it all out.

All right, so how do we get to our rotor? Well, we have our rotor gesture. Now it really helps to think of our rotor gesture like maybe the same motion that we would use when open a bottle or a soft drink cap. Now we'll need to place two of our fingers on our screen and it doesn't matter which two fingers we use. However, most people seem to prefer using their thumb and their index finger.

So to start our rotor, we'll just place our two fingers on our screen, and then we'll just rotate them clockwise and we'll do that.

Voiceover: Lines.

Douglas: And there's Lines.

Voiceover: Text Selection, Speaking Rate 50%.

Douglas: Yeah, and that moves us forward through our rotor items. And if we were just to move our two fingers counterclockwise, let's do that.

Voiceover: Lines, Words, Characters, Misspelled Words, Edit.

Douglas: Yeah, and that moves us backwards through all of our items in our rotor. All right, so how about we check out what our rotor can really, really do for us? And we'll do this by moving through some text in our Notes app. Now our Notes app is already open here and we just so happen to be in a demonstration note. Yeah, so let's say that we would like to move through our document by characters. We first need to move through our rotor and find our Characters item. So let's go ahead and do that. We'll move through our rotor here.

Voiceover: Characters.

Douglas: Ah, there it is. So now that we have our Characters item selected, each time we swipe down our screen we'll move forward by character. And if you want to move backwards by character, we'll just swipe up our screen. Okay, so let's go ahead and swipe down our screen a couple of times and we'll check out how this all works. So we'll just swipe a couple of times.

Voiceover: Cap U. Uniform.

Douglas: Yeah, our first letter and we get the phonetic of every letter here. So we'll keep swiping here.

Voiceover: S. Sierra

Douglas: This word's actually "Using" here, using the rotor.

Voiceover: I. India. N. November.

Douglas: We'll swipe down again.

Voiceover: G. Golf.

Douglas: And one more time here.

Voiceover: Space.

Douglas: And let's go ahead and swipe back to the beginning of this word here. We'll do it a character at a time of course 'cause we have characters selected and we're swiping up.

Voiceover: G, N.

Douglas: And swiping up here.

Voiceover: S, cap U, uniform.

Douglas: We heard our top of list audio cue so we know at the very beginning then. Okay, so it can be pretty easy to get lost in our document when we're moving by characters. And you know, we could move by words, but how about we check out how to move by lines because moving by lines gives us the ability to move by larger chunks or pieces of text. And this can be a great way to proofread our documents. So you guessed it. To do this, we'll need to move through our rotor and select our Lines item. So let's go ahead and do that. We'll just move to lines here.

Voiceover: Lines.

Douglas: Okay, we've selected our lines and now we can just swipe down and up our screen to move through our document by lines. So let's move through a few lines here and see how this looks. And we just swipe down here.

Voiceover: Using the rotor.

Douglas: Yeah, there's our title and we're gonna get some extra document information when I swipe down here.

Voiceover: 21 point. Not bold. System font, regular.

Douglas: And that's just a blank line so we'll swipe down again.

Voiceover: The rotor is a great tool for moving through text by characters.

Douglas: And I'm swiping down.

Voiceover: Lines. The rotor can also be used to-

Douglas: Swipe down again.

Voiceover: Navigate through a website.

Douglas: Yeah, and it is as easy as that. Well actually it might take a bit of practice to really get the hang of it. Now this is how we'll move through our text in any app that has a text area such as an email, a text message, or you know, maybe in our Pages app.

It's also great to know that our rotor gives us the ability to move through a website by items such as headings, links, and even form controls. But we probably also noticed that there were other items in our rotor here. So how about we quickly take a look at one of my favorites and this is our Speaking Rate item. So let's go ahead and find our Speaking Rate item here in our rotor. So we'll just go back to our rotor here.

Voiceover: Text selection. Speaking rate, 50%.

Douglas: Okay, we have our speaking rate selected now. So now we can just swipe up our screen to increase our speech rate. And you know what, let's do that. We'll just swipe up a couple of times here and we just swipe up

Voiceover: 55%.

Douglas: Here's 55. Swipe up.

Voiceover: 60%

Douglas: And there's 60. You can hear it getting faster.

Voiceover: 65%.

- We can really get it going really fast there. And we can just swipe back down our screen to slow down our speech again, and we'll just swipe back down to 50 here.

Voiceover: 60%.

Douglas: Yeah, back down to 50.

Voiceover: 55%.

Douglas: One more time.

Voiceover: 50%.

- Okay. And, you know, it's good to know that 50% is actually our default speech rate. Now our Speech Rate item will need to be added before it will actually show up in our rotor. But it's our lucky day because we have a resource right below this workshop called "Adding Items to Our Rotor" and it does a pretty good job of explaining exactly how to add additional rotor items.

Okay, so there you go. That pretty much covers exactly how to use our rotor gesture. I tell you, a rotor gesture really is a great feature and can really help when we want to edit our text, move through a website, or even find some of our most commonly used settings. Again, my name is Douglas Walker. Take care and I'll see you next time.