Customize Gestures on Your Smartphone for Users who are Blind or Partially Sighted

Speaker 1:
Shaun of the Shed. An AMI original podcast.

Shaun Preece:
Hello you beauties, and welcome back to the Shed. I am Shaun Preece, this is my shed, and this is the... I don't know why I say it weird like that. I just do. Let it go. This is the technology show where we talk about all the tech that can be so useful if you're blind or visually impaired like me. But don't worry sighted people, don't run away, don't hit that back button. Stop. Stay there because, hey, you never know, it could be interesting. You may learn something. We will find out.

Today's episode is going to be a quick one because I want to talk about customizing gestures on your smartphone. Woo. Let's be honest, not a particularly interesting subject, but a really useful feature that you should know about. For those of you that don't know, and yes I am looking at you sighted people, well I'm trying to, the way that we as blind or visually impaired people use a smartphone is totally different to sighted people. We can't just pick up the phone, look at the screen, and tap on Facebook or WhatsApp and have it spring into life, because we don't know where it is on the screen. So as everyone knows, you look with your hands, not your eyes.

The way we do it is through gestures. Now, there are loads of different gestures we can use. That's just the basic navigation. There's a two-finger double tap, two-finger triple tap, two-finger quadruple tap. And swiping up, down, left, right, however. Some of those gestures, they're empty. They don't have any function assigned to them, so we could do with them whatever we want. So I could customize it to be, I don't know, let's say copy or paste something in or from the clipboard. So that's what I'm going to show you how to do today. This is going to be a quick one.

It's pretty straightforward, but it is, as I said, really useful. So let's get to it. Firstly, I'm going to show you how to do it on the iPhone and then we'll take a look at Android. So the first thing we're going to do is relax. Just take a breath, we got all the time in the world. Pick up your iPhone and open up settings. Now go to accessibility and then voiceover. Once you're in here, swipe through the list of options until you hear commands and double-tap. Now on this screen, you will see a list of, prepare yourself I'm going to use the technical term, things. There's a list of about four things that you can customize. Right at the top is touch gestures, which is what we are interested in. There's also a keyboard. If you use a Bluetooth keyboard for example, you can customize what that does. And handwriting as well, you can customize the gestures in handwriting. And also brittle displays.

But right now I want touch gestures. So let's double-tap on that option right at the top. Now in here is a list of every gesture you can use on your smartphone, and they are split into particular groups. Right at the top of the list is all the taps. So one-finger tap, two-finger tap, and further down you have swipes. What you need to do is go through that entire list until you find the gesture that you want to customize. The thing that I'm going to change is the two fingers swipe to the right and the two fingers swipe to the left. When I swipe to the right with two fingers, I want it to jump to the next heading on whatever I'm on. So if I'm in a webpage, it will jump to the next heading on that webpage. Or in a document, the next heading in that document.

Let's swipe through until I find two fingers swipe to the left or to the right. It does tell you the currently assigned function. What I'm going to do is double tap on that gesture because that's what I want to change. On this next screen is a list of all the different functions and actions that I can assign to that gesture. And again, there is just so many. Now, the one that I want, as I said, if I swipe to the left if I remember rightly with two fingers, I want that to jump to the previous heading on the screen. There it is, previous heading. So now I'm going to double-tap on that. And here we have the warning dialogue box. And this is important if you muck around with the basic gestures here, you can totally change how your smartphone works and that could make it really difficult to use.

So do be very careful about what gestures you change. Let's hit a sign. And bouch, it's changed. I know it's really easy, right? So let's quickly see that in action. I've gone to a webpage here. I'm on ami.ca. Great website, check it out, and let's see if that two fingers swipe works. So I'm going to swipe to the right with two fingers, and there we go. It's jumped to the next heading in. Let's do it again and we can keep going. Beautiful. So that's how we change the gestures on the iPhone. But what about Android? Alright, I am getting to it. Let's take a look. Thankfully we can do exactly the same thing on Android phones as we can do on the iPhone. First things first, we need to get to the talkback settings in order to customize controls on Android, and there's a few different ways to do that.

You can open up the settings app, go to accessibility, and then double-tap on talkback, and then double-tap on settings. That's one way, and what I'm going to use here on Android 13 is simply tapping the screen with three fingers to bring up the talkback menu. Then swipe through until you hear talkback settings and double tap. So in talkback settings, swipe through until you hear customize gestures. Double tap. Just like with the iPhone now we see a list of all the possible gestures for Android, and you just swipe through until you find the one that you want to change. Once in there, double tap and you will see a list of all the various functions you can assign to that gesture. I will say the range of functions and actions here are a little bit less than on the iPhone, but there's still plenty of really useful functions here.

So all you need to do is swipe through until you find the action that you want to assign to your chosen gesture and double tap, and that's it. Now you can just go through and repeat the process as many times as you'd like, changing as many gestures as you'd like. That's how you customize gestures. As you can see a really useful feature and can really make your use of your smartphone more efficient. If you've got a gesture that you're not using or it has a feature that you're not using, why not assign it to a function that you use more often, such as copy or paste or navigating around the screen. Is that, that was quick. It was, wasn't it? That's because it's a really easy feature to use, but it can be really powerful. So everyone should know about it. I hope you did find that useful, and if you want to get in contact with me to let me know I'm great or terrible, just great would be fantastic. You can email feedback@ami.ca. Don't forget to smash, I believe the youth say, Smash that like button. And don't forget to subscribe. Take care. I love you. We'll see you later on.