Reachability with voiceover?

By TheBllindGuy07, 2 November, 2024

Forum
iOS and iPadOS

So I always had a gesture since this is possible to go to the status bar on my iphone xs and now 14. It can be very useful sometimes.
I have just learned about reachability and how sighted users can use it. I know I could just assign a gesture for it and it will probabyl work, but is there another more elegant way to use this feature with voiceover? Can we just swipe at the botom of the screen as indicated in the doc, or whatever the way is, and reachability will just work with vo? I have not tried this fully but I know that on another iphone not mine when VO on there seems to be sounds for reachability so I imagine this just works with VO?

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Comments

By Dave Nason on Friday, November 8, 2024 - 02:27

Member of the AppleVis Editorial Team

Hi. Yes, there is a default gesture for this when using VoiceOver. It’s a little tricky to explain but I’ll do my best.
You start as though you are doing the gesture to go to the Home Screen, i.e. the slide up from the bottom of the screen.
However when you reach the blip for Home, instead of lifting your finger to go home, you do a quick flick down and release.
You will hear a swoosh sound if you did it successfully.
Or, if you’re on an iPhone with a home button, I believe you double tap, but do not click, the home button.
You can toggle reachability on or off in Settings, under General > Accessibility > Touch.
Dave

By Brian on Friday, November 8, 2024 - 02:27

I can confirm that double tapping the Home button does in fact activate Reachability, on my SE3 running iOS 18.1. 🙂👌

By TheBllindGuy07 on Friday, November 8, 2024 - 02:27

But for those with home buttons, how do you
1 enable voiceover
2 or enable app switcher?
:)
Many thanks for your help.

By TheBllindGuy07 on Friday, November 8, 2024 - 02:27

So a quick guide to others.
Indeed the gesture is actually more complicated than braille screen input in my opinion.
Basically with iphone x and above you swipe like you rwant to go to home
You stop to the second click (the first click being when you actually touch the bottom of the screen, standard home and app switcher gesture, you got it?).
Then you perform a swipe down, somehow a little faster than your previous swipe up. If you do a swipe down at normal speed you will just hear the first click again and nothing will happen. You must have completed your second quick swipe down before you actually hear the first click again...

Then to exit reachability you either do this again or tap above the status bar in the upper edge of the screen and you recover your full size screen.
For those who know the sound schema is the same than for mission control with voiceover on mac (although I am not sure if these sounds are not that of mission control itself or actual VO sounds when we use mission control?). Anyways.
I don't want to repeat but I just actually noticed the "quick" in the first reply so others could be confused too.

By Brian on Friday, November 8, 2024 - 02:27

The home button is also a touch sensor. So the available actions on it are as follows:
1. Press one time to go Home.
2. Press 2 times to open App Switcher.
3. Press 3 times to toggle VoiceOver (or whatever accessibility shortcut you choose).
4. Tap once and hold to unlock device with TouchID. (note by default you have to press once, then release, but there is the option of unlocking without pressing down on Home button).
5. Double tap the surface of the Home button (do not press) to toggle Reachability.

HTH. 😎