Using Screen Zoom On Your iPhone or iPad

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at using the Zoom function on your iPhone or iPad.

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So sometimes when working on your iPhone or iPad you might see some text that's too small to read or just an area of the screen that you want to enlarge. You can use the zoom function to do that. So on either your iPhone or iPad go to Settings. In Settings look for Accessibility. Accessibility has the Zoom function right under Vision and you can turn it on. When you do so you'll see this little window that appears and you can move it around. You can move it by dragging the little handle at the bottom. What this will do is it will magnify anything that's underneath it so you can read some text easier. When you get to the edge and you move you can keep pushing past the edge to view more towards the edge of the screen or towards the corners. 

Now once you have this switched on it's easy to turn On and Off. You just use three fingers. A 3 finger double tap anywhere on the screen will turn it Off or turn it On. Now once you have it on, in addition to using the handle with one finger at the bottom to move around, you could also use 3 fingers and drag on another part of the screen and you could see the window stays in the same spot but the area it shows changes. You can use 3 fingers and if you double-tap but immediately start dragging on the second tap you can zoom in and out changing the magnification level. Just up and down with those 3 fingers. It's a little tricky to do. You have to be quick on the double-tap and you have to immediately start dragging on that second tap for it to work. 

Now there are a whole bunch of different options and ways to modify this. First let's look at Follow Focus. This mostly has to do with text. So we're going to turn this On and go to a different app. Let's go to the Notes app. With Follow Focus on we'll turn on Zoom with 3 fingers double tapping. Now we can move around as before. But if we start to type it will immediately jump so the text is inside the Zoom area. Then it will follow along. 

Now if we use the option Smart Typing it will do something a little different. Now I'll activate Zoom with 3 finger double-tap and then I'll start typing. What it is going to do is zoom in on the entire area where you could type but leave the keyboard out of it. It will still follow along so you can always see what it it you're typing. 

Now the next set of options is for using a keyboard. So you normally wouldn't be using the keyboard with an iPhone but you can. On an iPad though it's getting more and more common to have a keyboard attached. If so you've got a whole set of keyboard shortcuts you can use here and switch On and Off and use the Zoom feature. Zoom In and Zoom Out, move the Zoom window and so on. 

Another way to control the Zoom feature is to use the Zoom Controller. Let's turn that On and you could see the zoom controller has this little circle with arrows in it at the bottom. Now I can tap with one finger and drag it around and reposition it to get it out of the way. Now if I turn on Zoom with the double 3 finger tap then I can use this and move the zoom window around. Notice when I first start doing it it gives me a little mini version of my iPhone at the bottom just to give me some context of where I'm zooming to. This is also a little tricky because you have to start moving right away when you tap and move. If you tap and wait then you're simply moving the control again. 

Now you can also single tap, double tap, and triple tap. This Control will do different things. Each one of these can choose three different things it can do. There's Show Menu. There's zoom In and Out and Speak on Touch. We'll look at Show Menu here in a minute. Zoom In and Out basically turns this On and Off. We'll look at Speak on Touch in a minute as well. If you see the double-tap is zoom in and out so I can just double-tap on the Controller to turn it On and Off. Now you can also double-tap and immediately start sliding Up and Down to adjust the zoom level if you've got this control turned on. If you like you can change the color of the control there and you can also change how it transparent the control looks. Let's leave the control off for now and let's jump down to Zoom Filter.

This is where I can set a Filter for the Zoom. So I could go, say, to Inverted, Gray Scale, Gray Scale Inverted, or Low Light. You can also set the maximum Zoom level which prevents you from accidentally zooming so far in that it is difficult to figure out where you are at. 

Now with the Zoom Controller there's also something you can set here on one of the taps called Show Menu. When you have that turned On then tapping once on the Zoom Controller will bring up this Menu. You can easily turn Zoom On and Off with that. You can also choose the Region which allows you to go to Full Screen and we'll look at that in a minute. You can resize the lens which allows you to grab a corner and change the size of the lens there. You can choose one of those filters and you can Hide the Controller. You can also set the Zoom level with the slider right here. So this little Menu is kind of handy. You have it setup with a single tap, double tap, and triple tap with the Controller On you can really control it all right from here. So if you find yourself using Zoom a lot you're going to want to have the Zoom Controller turned On and those three tap options configured. 

Let's finally go to Zoom Region and there's a setting here to change from window zoom to full screen zoom. Now the entire screen is zoomed in. When you do this you definitely want to have the window controller On because otherwise it's very difficult to navigate around. I could drag down with one finger and it kind of snaps back to where it was. But with the window controller On I can easily move around and basically magnify the entire screen like that. But you turn Zoom On and Off the same way. So if you're stuck in this mode you just need 3 fingers double-tap on the screen and it turns it Off. 

So one last thing to look at is Speak on Touch. You can see here in the Zoom Controller I have it set for the triple-tap to be Speak on Touch. So let's go and try to use that. Let's switch to Safari and let's say we want to be able to see some text a little bit better. What I can do is triple-tap the controller at the bottom. Now you can see it has got the little finger icon there. Now I can tap something on the screen and it is going to speak what's in there. Just so you triple-tap on the controller, wait till I see that little finger icon there, and then tap something on the screen and it will speak it. 

So if Zoom is already something you know you need then give it a try, learn how to use the Controls so you can use it when you need it. But even if you haven't needed it up to this point it is a handy tool to have. So it's worthwhile learning so when you do need it you know how to use it. 

Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.