iPhone Accessibility Features
How To: These Hidden Gestures Can Instantly Undelete Emails for You on Your iPhone or iPad
It's easy to start panicking when you delete an important email, but it's even easier to undo the mistake on your iPhone or iPad. You can retrieve an accidentally deleted email instantly on iOS and iPadOS with the help of a hidden gesture, and you'll be much more efficient with the Mail app once you learn how to use it.
How To: Snap Photos on Your iPhone Hands-Free for Better Selfies, Group Shots, and Low-Light Pictures
You can take a photo on your iPhone with just one tap or press, but you can also use the Camera app hands-free for more impressive images. Doing so lets you take more detailed selfies, include your whole group in the frame, or get steadier results in Night mode — and it's easy to accomplish. Spoiler alert: using "Hey Siri" is not enough.
How To: Scroll Through TikTok Hands-Free on Your iPhone or iPad Using Simple Voice Commands
If you can't curb your TikTok obsession, at least make it more efficient by taking your hands out of the equation. So when you're eating breakfast, working on your computer, or using your hands for another non-TikTok task, you don't even have to touch your iPhone or iPad to scroll through all of those videos in your feed. Instead, you can just tell it what to do, and it'll listen.
How To: Use a Custom Gesture to Clear All Apps from Your iPhone's App Switcher in Seconds
After just a few hours, your iPhone's app switcher can become cluttered and even chaotic enough that you won't even want to use it. If you like your app switcher clean and tidy, with only your current session's apps accessible, there's a trick to force-quitting all apps simultaneously rather than one by one.
How To: 11 Ways to Show the Battery Percentage Indicator on Your iPhone
When you look at your status bar on your iPhone, you'll almost always see the battery icon, which gives you an estimate of how much battery life you have left before you need to charge the device. What you won't always see is the exact battery percentage, but there are multiple ways to force it out of hiding.
How To: Prevent Autocorrect Fails with This Hidden iPhone Trick
Auto-Correction only improves with time, but after 15 years of continuous development by Apple, it's still nowhere near perfect on the iPhone. However, a few hidden features in iOS can help avoid or mitigate future autocorrect failures, one of which warns you every time it's about to make a word change.
How To: 8 Ways to Shut Down and Restart Your iPhone 13, 13 Mini, 13 Pro, or 13 Pro Max
There are multiple ways to turn your iPhone 13, 13 mini, 13 Pro, or 13 Pro Max on and off, but it can be confusing because those ways will either shut down, power on, restart, or force restart the device.
How To: 8 Ways to Take a Screenshot on Your iPhone 13, 13 Mini, 13 Pro, or 13 Pro Max
Using an iPhone isn't difficult, but it can be if you're using it for the first time, especially if you switched from an Android phone. That's primarily because of the massive difference in the user interface between the two operating systems. And when it comes to taking screenshots, you have more options than just using the hardware buttons.
How To: Sick of Yellow Links in Notes? Make Them Any Color You Want with These Hidden iPhone, iPad, and Mac Settings
If you're tired of the default yellow link colors in your Notes app, which I find hard to look at in light mode, there's a way to change them to another color on your iPhone, iPad, and/or Mac.
How To: Use Live Captions on Your iPhone for Real-Time Transcriptions of Any Audio — Calls, Videos, Podcasts, and More
With Apple's latest accessibility feature, you can get live transcriptions of anything you're listening to on or around your iPhone. Real-time captions work for phone calls, video conferences, FaceTime, music, podcasts, streaming media, movies, games, and more — even someone sitting right next to you talking.
How To: Stop Your iPhone's Side Button from Accidentally Ending Audio Calls Early
Whenever you're on an audio call in the Phone or FaceTime app and accidentally press your iPhone's Side button, the call ends immediately. It's a helpful feature for those who like to terminate calls that way, but it's flat-out annoying for everyone else who inadvertently ends calls prematurely. Now, everybody wins because you can choose what happens during calls when you lock your device.
How To: Assign Each App on Your iPhone a Background Sound to Set the Mood
You can play background sounds on your iPhone to help you focus, stay calm, or fall asleep, giving you a personal sound machine wherever you go. Even better, there's a way to set each of your apps to play one of Apple's six ambient soundscapes automatically. When you open the app, its assigned sound plays, then it stops when you exit or switch to another app.
How To: Turn Your iPhone into a Personal Sound Machine to Help You Focus, Rest, and Stay Calm
If you get distracted or stressed out easily, your iPhone might be able to help you focus or calm you down. It can even help you fall asleep with white noise, and you don't have to install a third-party app or buy an audio track to turn your iPhone into a personal sound machine.
How To: 9 Ways to Quickly Open the Hidden Magnifying Glass Feature on Your iPhone
The iPhone has included a real-world magnifying glass called "Magnifier" since iOS 10. Still, it remained relatively obscure until iOS 14 when it received significant upgrades such as a new interface, hideable controls, a customizable toolbar, improved filters management, multi-image shooting, and people detection. But one of the best things about the update is that you can open it more easily.
How To: iOS 15 Gives You More Reasons to Use Your iPhone's Accessibility Shortcut
I use the Accessibility Shortcut on my iPhone practically every day, whether it's to dim the screen below the standard threshold, keep my child confined to a specific app, or open up the simulated magnifying glass. But with iOS 15, there are at least three more things I can use it for, and one of them is really good.
How To: Adjust Accessibility Settings on a Per-App Basis on iOS 15
Accessibility features — such as spoken content, reduced motion, and voice control — help those who might have hearing, vision, learning, or physical and motor disabilities better use their iPhone devices. These features are very welcome, but when enabled they work system-wide, which can be a problem if you need these settings enabled only in certain situations.
How To: Set Unique Alert Tones for Different Types of Sounds with iOS 15's Sound Recognition
Your iPhone's Sound Recognition feature is a powerful tool to help keep you alert to the world around you. With it, iOS will inform you if it hears a fire alarm, a door bell, glass breaking, among many other kinds of sounds. In iOS 15, Apple is updating the feature, allowing you to choose the alert tone that plays when iOS recognizes a specific sound.
How To: Sound Recognition on iPhone Gets 2 New Detectable Sounds in iOS 15
Sound Recognition was introduced with iOS 14, and the accessibility feature uses on-device intelligence to detect 13 different sounds and then notify you whenever it hears one. Apple increases that number to 15 with the addition of two more detectable sounds in iOS 15 that it should have included from the get-go.
How To: Unlock Your iPhone After a Restart Using Just Your Voice
You know the drill: After booting up your iPhone, you need to swipe up or press the Home button, then punch in the passcode to unlock Face ID or Touch ID. It's the way things have always been — but it doesn't have to be. Instead, you can unlock your iPhone using just your voice, even after a restart.
How To: Update Your iPhone Calculator's Look with These Easy Color Mods
If you're anything like me, you use the Calculator app on your iPhone like fifty times a day, and you're sick of the same user interface it's had since iOS 11 came out. While you can't mod the button shapes and sizes, there is a way to breathe new life into your calculations with some Calculator theming.