Make Hand-Free Instagram Videos With iPhone Accessibility Features

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I love the press-to-shoot feature of Instagram’s video mode: it stops you from making one long boring take to fill up that eight seconds or however long it is that you get. But maybe you want to make a boring one-shot clip, or you’re planning on making the world’s shortest remake of Hitchcock’s Rope. Whatever, this neat trick from Photojojo is for you.

The trick makes use of Assistive Touch, a little-known part of iOS that lets you assign gestures to specific functions. The idea is that folks who can’t press buttons or make pinching motions or otherwise have trouble controlling their iPhones can come up with new gestures that they can do. And that function can be used to make custom controls.

In this case, the custom control is “pressing on the same spot for eight seconds.” Following Photojojo’s how-to, you can make an eight-second button-push gesture and then drag the virtual button over the top of the actual Instagram (or Vine) button. Tap once and you’re done.

Lazy? Sure. But also a good demo of the power of the accessibility features in iOS.

Source: Photojojo

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