The iPhone provides users with visual impairments or hearing impairments with various accessibility features to improve their user experience, such as:
VoiceOver can be used to read your screen or select text, as well as zooming in on it, invert colors and more – but there may be another reason for you to turn it off: an iOS 7 bug has created another reason.
- Go to Settings
Every mobile phone brand holds its own secrets, but none more so than Apple iPhone. People line up hours to buy the newest model – while many may already own an iPhone they don’t even realize all its capabilities! From an easy way to read your texts out loud to another way to control music, there are countless hidden tricks waiting to be uncovered on it.
Under General in Settings, go to Accessibility, then Speech. Here you’ll find options for customizing what your iPhone says out loud; including text corrections and suggestions. Furthermore, there’s an option for changing its speed as it reads aloud as well as whether or not to highlight text as it’s spoken.
You can use the Speak Selection setting in this menu to activate Siri and have her read any email or text message from an email or text. This feature can help those with difficulty typing access their iPhones more efficiently. Furthermore, using this menu you can set your “Relay Number” for RTT/TTY calls so they can transmit fuller messages than just their characters typed on.
This menu option on your iPhone gives you the power to enable or disable notifications, making the phone silent or less intrusive when receiving new texts or phone calls. Furthermore, enabling this setting allows people who text with you to know when you read their response and when you will be back.
Learn important iPhone commands here in the Settings, such as how to power off and open your Home screen, control center or switch apps by swiping up with finger or thumb and listening for two rising tones before lifting it.
- Go to General
The iPhone provides many useful features to assist people living with physical or sensory disabilities, including the VoiceOver screen reader – a gesture-based system which makes devices accessible even if users can’t see the display. To activate this feature, head to Settings and activate it; furthermore you can customize how VoiceOver reads text and controls its rotor.
VoiceOver allows you to select text by tapping and holding, then dragging your finger across an area. Use the rotor to navigate items like buttons and menus. When using a sighted keyboard, double-tap the spacebar for individual character and word selections or double-tap the spacebar twice for cursor activation when double tapping individual spacesbars for word selections; or pause two seconds to hear phonetic spelling of any given word or phrase as well as pitch change and voice-activated scrolling capabilities.
Apple provides a guide for using VoiceOver on an iPhone, as well as Handoff, allowing you to seamlessly transition from device to device – for instance responding to email on one while watching movies on another – at will. To enable it, navigate to Settings then Tap Handoff and enable it.
If you want to switch on your iPhone quickly and efficiently, press and hold the sleep/wake button for two to three seconds, and say ‘Voiceover on’ or ‘Voiceover off’ when prompted. Or swipe up or down in Notification Center; or go into General settings and turn Siri & Dictation off or on as appropriate.
- Go to Accessibility
The iPhone offers numerous accessibility features designed to assist people with vision, physical, motor, hearing and speech challenges in using it effectively. These features can assist users by helping to access apps, navigate screens and select items quickly, adjust settings accordingly and control nearby devices more easily. You can set an Accessibility Shortcut so these features can be activated or disabled with just a press of Home button.
To open the Accessibility menu, hold down the sleep/wake button for two to three seconds and say either “Voiceover on” or “Voiceover off,” using either voice command or Siri command respectively. To stop Siri listening for additional speech commands and listening out for additional speech commands again, press again the wake/sleep button or say “Stop Listening.”
Accessibility features of our phone include AssistiveTouch (for use with external switches to operate it), Display and Text Sizes, Invert Colors (to make the screen more readable) and Speak Selection (reads aloud selected text with two fingers). Hearing accessibility features such as Hearing Devices allow Bluetooth hearing aid pairing as well as RTT/TTY calling via software or hardware TTY calls; you may also select LED Flash for Alerts which makes the screen flash when an alert arrives.
If you have physical or motor disability, using the rotor to navigate quickly between items on the screen is a powerful way of getting around more efficiently. To set its settings, rotate two fingers on the screen as though turning a dial. VoiceOver then announces what settings have been set by rotating two fingers on it as though turning dial.
To adjust the size of an onscreen keyboard, drag one of its corners. If you would rather resize without maintaining proportions, click Panel Options, Typing, Keyboard Settings and use Dwell in Accessibility Keyboard Panel Settings instead.
- Go to Voice to Text
If you have difficulty reading, an iPhone’s accessibility features can help provide information for you. These include VoiceOver, Siri Zoom, Invert Colors and Speak Screen.
SIRI can assist in reading your messages and responding to them more quickly and accurately. Simply press and hold the Sleep/Wake button, commonly referred to as screen on/screen off button, until prompted and say ‘Voiceover On’ or ‘Voiceover Off’ as needed.
My iPhone recently underwent a factory reset, and now its voiceover speaks gibberish instead of text – using Samantha voice for voice-to-text, is there an effective solution for this issue?