For those of us who miss the iPhone home button or find the gestures awkward to use, even if we can’t use them directly; then AssistiveTouch is an alternative that we should consider. However,What is AssistiveTouch and how is it used??
In a very summarized way, AssistiveTouch adds a virtual button to our device in which we can record actions, gestures and other things. It is an accessibility function that will make our lives much easier.
What is AssistiveTouch?
As we discussed earlier, AssistiveTouch is designed as an accessibility feature that offers virtual buttons, which are primarily intended to replace physical buttons or gestures that can be useful. For example, if we have trouble swiping, AssistiveTouch can perform this gesture with a touch.
Although it is not the only thing it is used for, we can use it to supplant the functions of the start button or add a shortcut to open the camera application, among many other things.
How to Activate AssistiveTouch on iPhone
The first thing we will do is go to Settings and then click on Accessibility.
Now we are going to look for the Touch option.
Here we press AssistiveTouch.
We will press the switch to enable AssistiveTouch.
Immediately, we will see the AssistiveTouch button appear on the screen. In case we want to disable this feature later, we will have to repeat the steps mentioned above.
How to use Assistive Touch
After enabling it we will see this button available at all times. It does not matter if we are using an application, on the home or lock screen. We can change its position by holding down the button and moving it to another position.
Although first we are going to see the default configuration of this button.
notification center
When we press the Notification Center icon, obviously we are going to open the Notification Center. The positive thing about this is that we will not have to swipe down from the top of the screen to access notifications.
gestures
On many occasions, iPhone gestures require us to use several fingers at the same time. However, with AssistiveTouch we can avoid this and to use them we will have to do the following:
We press AssistiveTouch and then we go to Gestures.
We will have to select the number of fingers with which we want to use gestures.
Let’s see the selected number of points on the screen. If we choose a single finger, the phone will react as if we were using two, three, four or five fingers at the same time.
If we want to stop using gestures, we press on AssistiveTouch again.
Lock screen
When we click on this option, the phone is immediately locked.
Start
The Home button works like the classic Home button on older iPhone devices.
siri
This will launch Siri on the phone, eliminating the need to press the side button in order to activate it.
Personalized
Here we can make a selection of gestures with a single touch. By default, gestures such as rotate, swipe left, or scroll down are included. Although we can add our custom gestures.
How to customize AssistiveTouch
The first thing we will do is open Settings and go to the Accessibility> Touch> AssistiveTouch option.
Now we are going to click on Customize top level menu.
We will see the layout of the AssistiveTouch menu. To change any of the options, we will have to press on them.
A list with several options will appear, we can choose the one we want.
We can also add more options to the AssistiveTouch menu. For this we will have to press the Plus (+) button or we can also remove some buttons by clicking on Minus (-).
Once we’re happy with the results, we’re just going to hit Back to exit the customization screen.
Customize the AssistiveTouch button
But customizing the menu of this function is not the only thing we can do, we can also customize the button itself. We can set different actions for when we press the button in question, whether we press it twice or hold it down. This is a considerably useful idea to be able to open different applications, among other things.
Let’s remember that this will work, even if the device is locked, on the home screen or we are using an app. We could quickly access the camera with a double tap, for example.
For this we will have to access Settings> Accessibility> Touch> AssistiveTouch.
We go to custom actions and here we can choose any of the actions, such as double-press.
Next, we’ll need to assign an action to it. We can easily customize other actions by repeating the steps mentioned above.
How to add new gestures
We start by going back to Settings> Accessibility> Touch> AssistiveTouch and scroll down until we find Custom gestures, here we will choose Create new gesture.
We will draw the gesture we want and then we will press Save.
We’ll need to give the gesture a new name and hit Save.
Every time we press on the AssistiveTouch menu, we can see it.
