How To Use the AssistiveTouch Button On Your iPhone or iPad

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today, let's take a look at the AssistiveTouch Menu on your iPhone.

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So the AssistiveTouch Menu is something you can use on your iPhone or iPad to access functions that normally take a little bit more than just tapping the screen. For instance you may need to use a gesture or press one of the physical buttons on your phone to accomplish a task. Let's take a look at how to turn it on. Go to Settings and then go down to Accessibility. From there go to Touch and there you'll see AssistiveTouch at the top. Go in there and you can turn it on. Now you see that white circle inside of a black circle, that's the AssistiveTouch Menu. You can see it fades away after a few seconds but it remains on the screen.

Now you could drag this around and put it anywhere on the screen that you want. It snaps to the left or right side of the screen very easily. So you can drag it around but it's always going to try to snap to the closest side. Then after a few seconds it fades so you can see what's underneath it. So the idea is that it's there and you see it but it can kind of stay out of the way when you're not using it.

Now what it does depends on your Settings. If you look under Custom Actions you can see there's Single-Tap, Double-Tap, and Long Press. You can set an action to happen for anyone of those. For Single-Tap you see I have it set to Open Menu. Let's go and look at that. You could see here the top one is None, Open Menu is second, and then there's a whole bunch of other ones. So you can set it to a specific action. For instance setting it to Control Center will bring up Control Center if I tap it. So instead of using the gesture to drag down from the upper right hand corner to bring up Control Center you can just tap this button. You could set it to Home and then it would act as a Home button. As a matter of fact you could even drag it down to the middle and it will stay there. It will feel like an actual Home button.

Now if you have it set to Open Menu what it's going to do is give you a menu of choices including many of the options here. So you'll have other ways to get to some of these functions. The function list is pretty long and includes a lot of accessibility things. But it also includes Siri Shortcut. So you can create your own Siri shortcuts and it will appear in this list. Now that I have Single-Tap set to Open Menu I can try it. I'm going to give it a single tap and bring up this menu. This menu includes, by default, six different items. I can now just tap on one of these items to get to anyone of them.

For instance if I want to get to Control Center I can tap Control Center and it brings it up. So instead of using the Control Center gesture I can now tap once on the AssistiveTouch button and then tap on Control Center. Two taps will do it. Other options here include Siri so instead of having to press and hold the side button I can bring Siri up this way. Also I have a Home button there which I can use instead of my actual physical Home button or, in this case, the little bar at the bottom of the screen.

Now two of these buttons will actually lead to more options. If I hit Device it gives me some iPhone related options here. Like Volume up and Volume down. So here's a way to control volume without actually using the physical buttons on your phone. There's also Lock Screen, Rotate Screen and a Mute button. There's also a More button there and I could tap that and now I can see ways to get to the App Switcher, Take a Screenshot, trigger the SOS function and even simulate a shake or ApplePay. There's even a Restart there as well.

Notice the little back arrow in the middle. I can tap that to go back one screen and again to go back to this screen. Also, the Custom button there that will allow me to choose from a couple of gestures. Like, for instance, the long press or Double-Tap. So if I were to use one of those, say a Double-Tap, it gives me this circle on the screen here and I could tap anywhere just once but it will actually give me a Double-Tap instead of a Single-Tap in that spot. I turn it off by simply hitting the AssistiveTouch button again.

Now I can customize this as much as I want. See where it says Customize Top Level Menu. If I tap there you could see those six buttons. I could subtract one or add one. Hit the Plus button here and I could add one. You could see it just says the little plus button there and I could tap and now here's that list again minus the items that are already active. So I could pick something else from this list and use that. So for instance if I wanted to add a Screenshot there I can. Now Screenshot is that extra 7th button. Now whenever I tap there you could see it comes up as another option on the screen.

So you can go in here and you can also customize existing buttons. So I can hit say the Notifications button there and pick something else other than Notifications to fill that slot. I can also subtract the most recent items I've added and if I ever want to hit the Reset button and it will reset it to the default set.

Now under Custom Actions I can go and turn off Single-Tap for this and instead make it a Double-Tap for Open Menu. So now I have to tap twice to bring that up. So you have that as an option. You can also do it as Long Press instead. If ever you want to turn this off just return to this section of settings and you can switch this off. You can also ask Siri. "Turn AssistiveTouch On". OK I've turned on AssistiveTouch. "Turn AssistiveTouch Off" OK I've turned off AssistiveTouch.

Now there are a few different reasons you may want to use this. One is, of course, if you do have difficulty using some of the gestures on the screen or using the physical buttons. That's what it is really made for. But it could also help in other situations where using those is difficult. For instance if you put a case on it, maybe a waterproof case or something super protective, you can't quite use the physical buttons and you can't easily do gestures on the screen it might be easier to have these as simple buttons that you could tap once or twice or three times to get to the function you want. Other people may just prefer actually seeing a button and tapping a button to get functionality than remembering all the different gestures.

Also, of course, I've seen this used a lot when an iPhone is getting old and starting to breakdown. I've seen people with old iPhones where the Home button doesn't work anymore and AssistiveTouch has allowed them to continue using it because they can use the button as a Home button or access Home through there. The same with the volume buttons as well. They're able to access volume using AssistiveTouch even though, maybe, the volume buttons on their iPhone have failed.