Master Accessibility on iPhone and iPad
Here’s a rundown of the accessibility features in iOS and iPadOS
Just like the Mac, your iPhone and iPad have Accessibility features that enable you to change how you navigate and control them. Helpfully, most of them have the same names and work in a similar way to their Mac counterparts.
In iOS and iPadOS, Accessibility controls are accessed from the Accessibility section of the Settings app. Just like their Mac counterparts, the settings are split into several different categories. These are: Vision; Physical and Motor; Hearing; and General.
VISION CONTROLS
The settings in the Vision section are designed to make the iPhone and iPad easier to use for anyone with a vision impairment. Like the Mac, they also enable you to reduce motion in the interface — in the
Motion section — so that if you suffer from motion sickness, for example, you can switch off parallax icon effects, toggle cut–play of effects in messages, and switch auto–play video previews on or off.
VOICEOVER
VoiceOver on the iPhone and iPad works in a similar way to the Mac, providing audio descriptions and audio help for using your device. Using VoiceOver with apps relies to a certain extent on the apps providing the necessary information, but you can supplement that by going to Settings > Accessibility
> VoiceOver and tapping VoiceOver Recognition and then Screen Recognition, and toggling Screen Recognition to on.
There are lots of other settings to control VoiceOver, so take time to set it up before you switch it on. And you can use the slider to set the speed at which it speaks.
In addition to VoiceOver, Spoken Content and Audio Descriptions enable you to have your iPhone or iPad describe the content of, for example, images where it is available, or read out a piece of selected text.
ZOOM AND TEXT SIZE
The other settings, in the Zoom and Display & Text Size sections, enable you to control how your iPhone or iPad displays text and other screen content. You can, for example, in the Zoom section, specify how to control the zoom and manage the extent to
which the screen is magnified when you activate zoom.
PHYSICAL AND MOTOR
In addition to the physical and motor controls that they have in common with the Mac, the iPhone and iPad have others designed to work with features, such as the touch interface that are specific to them.
Also in this section are controls for Apple AirPods, if you happen to use them. These controls enable you to adjust the press speed for the AirPods’ Force Sensor, change the press and hold duration, enable noise cancellation mode when only one AirPod is in your ear, and you can even toggle head–tracking for your iPhone or iPad.
Just like the Mac, you can also control your iPhone or iPad using an adaptive accessory as a switch. In this case, you can create recipes, which are a series of actions that can be triggered with one activation on the switch. To manage these, go to Settings > Accessibility > Switch Control > Recipes.
The Keyboards section allows you to control your iPhone or iPad with an external keyboard, while the Side Button section allows you to specify the click speed and functionality for the iPhone/iPad side button.
HEARING CONTROLS
Hearing controls on the iPhone and iPad allow you to adjust how audio is played through headphones, manage hearing aids and other external devices, tell your iPhone to listen out for certain sounds, and to control subtitles and captioning.
The Hearing Devices section allows you to pair Made for iPhone (MFi) hearing aids and sound processors and toggle a switch to improve compatibility with hearing aids. If you want to connect a hearing device that’s not MFi, you can do that in the Bluetooth section of Settings.
The Sound Recognition section enables you to tell your iPhone or iPad to listen for certain sounds, like a baby crying or a doorbell, and alert you when it “hears” it. The Audio/ Visual section has multiple settings enabling you to manage Headphone Accommodations so that connected headphones work better for you, to cancel ambient noise in phone calls, and to tell your device to warn you if you have been playing audio at a high volume for a prolonged period.
In the Subtitles and Captioning section, you can tell your iPhone or iPad to give closed captions and subtitles for the deaf precedence over subtitles, and change the style of captions and subtitles.
PER–APP SETTINGS
As well as customizing the way your whole device works, you can make changes on a per–app basis. In Settings > Accessibility, tap Per–App Settings and then tap Add App. Choose an app. You can now tap the app and make changes to the way its content is displayed on screen.