The iPhone and iPad have a little known text-to-speech functionality that will verbally spell out a selected word or string for you. This great feature is useful for many obvious reasons, whether for educational purposes, or perhaps you can’t quite make out if what you’re reading on the iPad or iPhone screen is supposed to … Read More
Do you miss having a Home button on the iPhone X? Maybe your Home button isn’t working as expected, or is broken on an iPhone or iPad? Or maybe you’d just find it easier to tap on the screen to mimic a Home button press rather than using the hardware button? You can enable a … Read More
Have you ever found yourself with an iPhone or iPad that is stuck in VoiceOver mode and as a result you can’t unlock the iPhone or iPad? When VoiceOver is active and the screen is locked, if you’re trying to unlock the device or enter a passcode you may instead find that whatever is on … Read More
Some Mac users may find that if they connect an external mouse or trackpad to their MacBook or MacBook Pro, the internal built-in trackpad then no longer works. This may appear like a bug, and some users may think it’s a hardware problem, but the good news is that the inability to use both a … Read More
The Accessibility Shortcut in iOS allows users to quickly enable and use various accessibility features on an iPhone or iPad, giving near instant access from just about anywhere to features like AssistiveTouch, Invert Colors, Color Filters, the Magnifier, Reduce White Point, Smart Invert, VoiceOver, and Zoom. For example, a great usage for the Accessibility Shortcut … Read More
The iPhone X side button performs an impressive array of functions, working as a power button, a screen lock button, a summon Siri button, summoning Apple Pay, accessibility shortcuts, part of the snapping screen shot sequence, part of a steps to force restart, and more. That’s a lot of work for a single iPhone button! … Read More
iPhone has the capability to automatically answer inbound phone calls. Much as this sounds, with the auto-answer feature enabled, the iPhone will answer all phone calls automatically that come to the phone. Auto-Answer Calls is an excellent accessibility setting that has many obvious uses and a wide range of applications for nearly all sorts of … Read More
Did you know the iPhone or iPad can read aloud anything that is on screen? The Speak Screen feature of iOS is helpful for many reasons, but in order to use it you must first enable the ability within the device settings, and then learn how to use the speak function.
The latest versions of iOS for iPhone include an excellent Magnifier feature which can turn the iPhone camera and screen into a magnifying glass. This has many potential uses, but perhaps the most useful in day-to-day life is as a reading aid to read tiny text without squinting and straining your eyes. Instead, you can … Read More
The built-in trackpad on MacBook Pro and MacBook functions as the primary input method of the Apple laptops, but if you primarily use an external mouse or external trackpad you may occasionally find the built-in trackpad receives input you’d rather the Mac ignore. With a simple settings adjustment you can do exactly that, ignoring any … Read More
Siri has the ability to read anything on the screen of an iPhone or iPad to you. And yes, that means Siri will quite literally read aloud whatever is open and on the display of an iOS device, whether it’s a web page, an article, an email, a text message, anything on the screen will … Read More
What happened to Slide-to-Unlock in iOS 10? If you’ve updated to iOS 10 on your iPhone or iPad, you’ve undoubtedly noticed one of the most immediately noticeable changes; slide to unlock no longer works. Instead if you slide right on the lock screen of iOS 10 you end up in the widgets screen. Replacing that … Read More
Mac users who have explored the Display Accessibility preference panels, perhaps to disable transparency or to increase visual contrast, have likely seen another setting called “Differentiate without color.” If you have wondered what that setting does or means, you’re certainly not alone, and you may have even toggled it on or off trying to see … Read More
Mac OS X defaults to a predefined set system font size for all onscreen text and user interface elements, and while many users will find the default text size to be sufficient, some users may wish the system font size was larger, and some may wish the Mac system text size was smaller. It turns … Read More
iOS includes a helpful feature which allows users to zoom into anything on an iPhone or iPad screen to make it easier to read text and view elements. While this feature is undeniably useful for many users, it can also be a source of frustration for others who wind up enabling the feature accidentally, only … Read More
Many Mac users may like to adjust the font size of file names, folders, and other text found in the Finder of OS X. This is particularly helpful if you find the default text size of Finder fonts to be small and challenging to read when navigating in the Mac file system, where increasing the … Read More
The Apple Watch user interface uses transparency in the Glances screens and elsewhere to add a subtle layering effect to the appearance of things on display. This is mostly an eye-candy effect, and while it’s quite subtle some users may wish to turn transparency effects off in WatchOS. By disabling transparency on Apple Watch, it … Read More
Transparent effects have had a prominent place in the user interface of Mac OS X ever since the Mac got a face lift with recent versions of MacOS Mojave, High Sierra, Sierra, OS X El Capitan and Yosemite. Many users like the transparency found throughout the window title bars and sidebars, but some users may … Read More
