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All 25 Features the iPhone Side Button Can Do
Apr 30, 2024
Rumor has it the #iPhone15 will replace the mute/silent switch with a customizable button that can do a number of actions you pick, much like the Apple Watch Ultra's Action button. However, there’s already (sort of) a feature like that you can use right now on any #iPhone. After you set it up, you can simply triple-click the iPhone side button to turn on up to 25 advanced #accessibility features. More Apple news: http://www.cultofmac.com Produced by Extra Ordinary for Cult of Mac Music composed by Will Davenport, arranged by D. Griffin Jones Follow us! Twitter: https://twitter.com/cultofmac Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/cultofmac Instagram: https://instagram.com/cultofmac/
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Rumor has it the iPhone 15 will have a programmable action button on the side that you can set
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to a variety of different settings and features, but you can already do that
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Kind of. You see, on any iPhone, you can triple-click either the side button or the home button
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to activate one of 25 different accessibility features. You just find this in Settings, Accessibility, and you scroll all the way down to tap on
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Accessibility Shortcut. I'm going to run through all 25. I'm going to start with the ones that everybody can get some use out of, but as is the case
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with accessibility, any one of these features is going to be absolutely essential to somebody watching
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Let's start with Guided Access. When you turn this on, your phone is locked to whatever app is currently on the screen
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This is really useful when you're handing your phone to a kid to play a game so they can't just swipe over and go running through your texts or phone calling or anything like that
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Additionally, when you activate it, you can turn off certain features like the volume buttons, the software keyboard, you can draw out parts of the screen that are blocked from
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the touchscreen, and you can turn off the power button as well
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So when you hand your phone to a security officer or a police officer, which you should
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never do if it can possibly be avoided, well, you can prevent them from locking the screen
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or going through your other apps on your phone. For some reason, this is the only feature that you can't turn on from the Accessibility
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Shortcut menu. You have to swipe back and enable it inside Guided Access
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Moving right along, next up is Background Sounds. You turn this on while you're working, studying, or going to sleep, and you can hear sounds
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of the ocean, of rainfall, of a running creek, of various white noises, of smooth jazz
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I wish. Next up is Voice Control. This lets you operate your phone entirely using your voice
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Instead of touching the screen, you can say things like, go home, open Safari, scroll
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down, tap refresh, things like that. You know, your phone is waterproof, but the touchscreen doesn't work if your hands are
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wet or oily or covered in grime. So while you're showering or cooking, you can say things like, pause music, or scroll
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down if you're reading a recipe. This is so handy. You can customize it with labels or numbers for all of the actions you can perform on
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screen at once. You can have this numbered grid overlaid on screen so you can say things like, scroll
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up 20 to turn up the volume from Control Center, things like that
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Speak Screen is like the previous feature in reverse. Your phone will read out the entire contents of what's on screen, an entire email, a text
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conversation, a recipe. I don't know why I keep coming back to that as an example, but Apple Watch Mirroring lets
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you use and interact with your Apple Watch from your iPhone. You can tap and scroll on the screen
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You can click in all the buttons. You can scroll on the digital crown. It's exactly the same
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Well, it's a little laggy compared to using the Apple Watch directly, but it'll do in
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a pinch. Like if you break your Apple Watch screen, but you still want to close your rings before
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you get your replacement in the mail, this is actually really useful if you have a treadmill
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desk at work. The idea is you wear your Apple Watch on your ankle, and then you use Apple Watch Mirroring
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from your iPhone to control and interact with it. That way, as you're walking on your treadmill at work, your Apple Watch still thinks you're walking
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Left, right balance. If one of your ears doesn't work quite as good as it used to, you go to Accessibility
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Audio Visual, and you adjust the little slider until it sounds just right
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It'll boost the volume in one of your ears to match the other one. And using this as an accessibility shortcut, you can quickly toggle it on and off when
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you connect it to a Bluetooth speaker or when you switch back to your normal headphones
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It's that easy. Assistive Access. This reboots your phone into a special mode where it only has the core, basic features
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of messaging, calling, camera, photos. That's pretty much it. And you have giant, easy-to-use, obvious buttons for everything
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It's designed for people who will be overwhelmed by the complexity of a modern smartphone
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but still want the reliability and modern internet connectivity features. But you can use it too if you're too distracted by your phone when you're trying to study
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or work, but you still want to be connected in case a text or an important phone call
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comes through. Well, you can use Assistive Access instead. And you can still set any app from the App Store to be available in this mode, like for
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health monitoring or reading your RSS feeds. Magnifier. This is a special camera app that's designed to work as magnifying glass
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You have a big, obvious slider where you can zoom in and out. You can turn on the flashlight freely, which you can't do from the normal camera app
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You can take a few pictures to get a close look at something without crowding up your regular photo library
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Magnifier is available for free on the App Store. Detection mode is a special feature inside the Magnifier app that has its own shortcut
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This is designed for people who are low vision to be able to get around easily
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Door detection will tell you how close you are to a door, whether it's open or closed
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and it'll tell you about any words that are written on it. People detection will tell you how many people are nearby and how close they are
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Image description will describe what you're looking at. Text detection puts any text that it sees on screen
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And with point and speak, you can hold your finger in front of your camera and point it
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at a label on an oven or a microwave, and your phone will read it out to you. Zoom
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This is like Magnifier, but for your own phone screen. So you can have a little bubble that you can move around, or you can zoom in the entire
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display at once. You can zoom in really far, you can have it follow the keyboard input so you can only
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see what you're writing, and more. Live speech lets you type on the keyboard to speak
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When you're on a phone call or FaceTime call, Siri Voice will speak for you
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In person, it'll play the sound on earphone speakers. You can use the built-in Siri Voice, or you can make your own by recording your own personal
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voice as I have done in advance. Reduce white point. Sometimes even the lowest brightness setting is still too bright if you're in a pitch black room
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Well, reduced white point will make your phone screen even dimmer, dim flashing lights
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If you have photosensitive epilepsy or bad migraines, when you're playing a video or
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watching a game that has a lot of strobing or flashing lights, your phone will turn down
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the brightness and try to reduce the effects. Reduce motion. If you get really easily motion sick, you might be bothered by all of the animations
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of apps flying off the screen and zooming back in. Well, this will replace all of those animations with a simple crossfade
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Color filters change the output of your display to accommodate for color blindness
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You have a red-green filter, a green-red filter, I didn't know there was a difference but apparently
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there is, a blue-yellow filter, a grayscale filter, or you can adjust the hue manually yourself
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Smart Invert is for inverting your screen from light to dark, but it tries to make some clever exceptions
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If an app already runs in dark mode, it doesn't invert it back to light mode, and it tries
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to avoid inverting images, videos, and websites, because those look really funky when you reverse them
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Classic Invert is like Smart Invert, except it doesn't make any exceptions. It inverts everything, and everything just looks really weird, and I don't honestly know
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what it's for. Increase contrast. This selectively brightens and darkens various user interface elements like buttons, toggle
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switches, and backgrounds for better visibility. And in a similar vein, reduce transparency will take all of the transparent elements
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like headers and toolbars and keyboards, and it'll make them completely opaque instead
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of transparent. I don't know why you would want to activate either of these through a shortcut using your
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power button, but apparently you can. Live Captions uses Apple's speech-to-text system to provide on-screen subtitles and
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captions for any audio that's playing on your device. Phone calls, YouTube videos, podcasts, anything
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I only put it so far down this list because it doesn't work that great. It doesn't keep up very well with really fast-talking audio, so if you forget your headphones, it's
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not quite at the stage where you can watch a YouTube video on silent and read the captions
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It doesn't work that well. But as of right now, it's still in beta, so it'll get better over time if you're watching
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this in 2038 for some reason. Assistive Touch. This gives you a little floating on-screen widget that you can tap to do things like
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Control Center, Notification Center, Activate Siri, or even your own custom gestures
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In a similar vein, Switch Control lets you operate your entire phone with just one tap action
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You have this little blue highlighter that jumps around the screen. You tap once to select something, and then you tap again to confirm an action
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You can connect a special Bluetooth switch if you want to click instead of tap on the phone screen, or you can even control it with your face by blinking and moving your head
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and sticking out your tongue. Yes, those are actual features. I didn't make those up
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There is a whole treasure trove of customizable settings for this. You can even use Switch Control to control other devices on the same Apple ID, like a
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Mac or an iPad, all from your iPhone. There's no clip because I couldn't get it to work, but theoretically you can
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Full Keyboard Access lets you use a Bluetooth keyboard connected to your iPhone, not just
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for typing, but for moving around the home screen, launching apps, navigating inside
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apps, clicking buttons, everything. VoiceOver lets you control your phone without seeing the screen at all
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So you drag or tap your finger on the screen and it'll read out what you're pointing
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at and you double tap to select. You can set the speed and pitch of the voice
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You can turn on image descriptions where your phone will try and describe pictures to you
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It's a super powerful feature. It does change how a lot of the gestures on the phone work, so it takes some training
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and getting used to. And of course, there's an Apple Support document that explains it all for you
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So those are all of the accessibility features you can assign as shortcuts on your iPhone
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Be sure to like and subscribe if you learned something new. There's an article version of this in the video description
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I'm Dick Griffin-Jones with Cult of Mac
#Assistive Technology
#Consumer Electronics
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