Accessibility for Everyone
Apple’s iOS 14 adds several features to your iPhone, including VoiceOver, AI recognition for photos, sound recognition for things like fire alarms and doorbells, and sign language recognition in FaceTime. But there is one new capability called Back Tap which is surely worth mentioning.
What Is Back Tap?
Back Tap is just what it sounds like: it lets you tap the back of your iPhone to perform an action. The intended use is to turn on another accessibility feature, such as VoiceOver, but the feature is extremely versatile: it can be set up for accessibility features as well as basic system actions and also custom Shortcuts.
Works on iOS 14 on these iPhones…
The new accessibility feature works on the following iPhone models:
- iPhone 8, 8 Plus
- iPhone X
- iPhone XS, XS Max
- iPhone XR
- iPhone 11, Pro, 11 Pro Max
- iPhone 12, Pro, Max, Mini
- iPhone SE 2020
I was excited to see that my iPhone X was included in the list, since I expected it to be a newer-phone only feature.
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Here are the steps to set Back tap on your iPhone:
Open the main Settings app from your iPhone home screen and tap Accessibility.
In the Physical and Motor section, tap Touch. Scroll all the way to the bottom and select Back Tap.
You have two choices here: Double Tap and Triple Tap. At first I wondered why there was no single-tap option, but that would likely result in too many unintentional triggerings. This also means you can choose two different actions for back taps, one for double and one for triple taps.
iPhone Back tap options
The first section includes useful system action, including App Switcher, Control Center, Home, Lock Screen, Mute, Notification Center, Screenshot, and Siri. Accessibility options include VoiceOver, Assistive Touch, Classic and Smart Invert (which display inverted colors), and Speak Screen.
You can also use the taps to trigger Shortcuts. You can find a whole gallery of these in the Shortcuts app, and even create custom ones—say, for opening an app, sending a message to a particular contact, playing a podcast, creating a tweet, or getting directions home.
The options are virtually limitless. Any Shortcut you add will be available for use with iPhone Back Tap.
So tell me are you using back tap on your iPhone? For what functions did you set it? I would like to hear about it in the comment section bellow.
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