By Jessica Brown, 23 November, 2012
If you want a quick way to time something and you do not care about it being perfectly accurate but you do not want to have to go in to the clock app and set a timer, alarm or stopwatch, just single finger single tap on or swipe to the part of the statice bar that says the time. VoiceOver will say the time every minute. Note that because the iOS clock does not do seconds, when you first start timing, you will not know what second of the minute you are starting timing at, but after that you will get full minutes. Also, at the time you want to stop timing, you will not know what second it is at unless the timing stopps at the very end of the minute. However, all the minutes in the middle will be counted fully. The only ones that will not be counted are the ones at the beginning and end. So if you are trying to time something you will only be off by up to 120 seconds, which is 2 minutes. To make it stop, just single finger single tap on or single finger swipe to anywhere on the screen except for the part of the status bar that says the time and it will stop saying the time. Another thing you could use this for is to not lose track of time when you need to leave home or do something at a certain time. You will not lose track of time if your iOS device is constently telling you the time. To make sure this will work, leave your screen unlocked and set auto-lock to never.
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Comments
How to hear the time every minute.
I never thought of that first minute thing
I have revised the guide
You could also assign a voiceover command to Watch item
I’ve done this before when I knew I needed to leave an area by a certain time.
Assigning the watch item command to a voice over gesture allows you to watch the time, then move your focus elsewhere.
For me, a 1 finger quadruple tap watches the current item. If it changes, voiceover should speak it immediately, unless you’re reading something, Or voiceover is speaking anything else. A watched item should speak after Voiceover finishes reading the current item.