Universidad Politécnica de Tapachula

Ing. En Logística y Transporte

INGLES VIII.

EP3. Artículo “Your Phone’s Accessibility Options Are More Useful

Than You Think”.

Por: Dori Rossmeri Castellón Maldonado.

8vo Cuatrimestre “A” Vespertino

Maestro:

Jhonatan Hidalgo Toledo.

Tapachula, Chiapas a 26 de marzo de 2020

Your Phone’s Accessibility Options Are More Useful
Than You Think

Many assume the “accessibility” features on our devices are helpful only to those with visual
or hearing impairments, but they’re useful for everyone.

March 24, 2020

Buried deep in your phone’s arcane settings are a collection of features under the mundane
banner “Accessibility.” These features seem as if they’re just for people who have special
needs — like being colorblind or having poor eyesight — but many of the tools you can find
there are useful to everyone.

There are slight differences in how some of these features are handled on iPhones versus
Android phones (and even further differences from one Android phone to another), but the
features we’ve rounded up below are generally available on most devices. They may be in a
different place depending on your device, but if you explore your phone, you’re likely to find
versions of these features somewhere in there.

Make text readable by adjusting the font size.

One of the most universally useful accessibility features is changing the font size on your
phone. As phones get bigger, they have more and more space for text. To the point that you
could potentially fit whole pages of a book on your screen. Some phones default to having
really small text so you can read as much as possible without scrolling, but this can also make
text harder to read.

On iOS devices like Apple’s iPhone and iPad, you can find this setting under Accessibility,
then Display & Text Size. From here, you have a lot of options, but the most relevant is
labeled “Larger Text.” Despite its name, you can use this to make text smaller as well. At the
top of the screen, you’ll also see a toggle labeled “Larger Accessibility Sizes” that give you
even more text size increments. Adjust the text until it’s comfortable for you to read and go
about your day.

On Android, Google’s mobile operating system, this feature can usually be found in the
Settings app under Accessibility, often labeled something like “Font size.” Android doesn’t
have quite as many levels of font sizes as iPhones do, but you can adjust the text to be
anywhere from slightly smaller to a couple of steps larger than normal. You might want to
turn the text size up to read it better, but you can also turn it down if your eyesight is good
enough and you would like to read more on a single screen.

Adjust the display size to make buttons easier to hit.

Text isn’t the only thing you can make bigger with your accessibility features. The buttons,
boxes and various other visual elements in your apps can be adjusted as well. For example,
your home screen can fit a certain number of icons on it. If you turn up the display size, you
might not be able to fit as many, but the ones you’re left with will be larger and easier to hit.

In Android, you can adjust this in the Settings app under Accessibility by choosing “Display
size.” Note that adjusting this setting will also bring the text size up or down with it, so you
may want to start with this, then go back and tweak the text size if your changes make it too
hard to read. Unfortunately, this feature doesn’t exist on iOS, but you do have a couple of
toggles you can tweak to add shapes to buttons so it’s clearer which part of the screen you
need to tap, or on/off labels for toggles that will tell you which position a switch is in.
Turn down the lights with a systemwide dark theme.

In the most recent versions of Android and iOS, both platforms have rolled out a systemwide
dark theme that is easier on the eyes than the searing bright white that most apps have leaned
on in recent years. While iPhones treat this as a basic display feature, which you can find
under Settings and then Display & Brightness, Android has it buried in the Accessibility
section.

To turn it on in Android, open your Settings app, head to the Accessibility subheading and
just under the font and display size sections, you’ll see a toggle for “Dark theme.” However,
you have a few more options to play with. If you enable you’ll find a setting under Theming
called “Accent color.” This will let you change the highlight color that’s used throughout the
system for things like buttons or menu heading.

End a phone call with the power button on Android.

In the early days of telephones, in order to hang up, you had to physically place the receiver
down on the phone’s base. The action gave phone calls a satisfying finality that just isn’t
achieved by lightly tapping a red spot on your screen. If you miss that — or just want a more
tactile experience to let you know when you’ve ended a call (so you don’t start talking aloud
about the person you were just on the phone with, only to realize you never actually hung
up) — you can enable a feature on Android phones that lets you press the power button to
end a call.

In the Accessibility section of the Settings app, you can find a toggle that reads “Power button
ends call.” With this switch enabled, you can hang up on any phone call by pressing the
power button on your phone. Sure, you can’t just slam your phone down on the table to hang
up, but it’s still more tactile than tapping the screen. Plus, you can do it without looking.
Pull up a magnifying glass with a quick shortcut

Both Android and iOS have a handy shortcut to pull up a magnifying glass with a triple tap.
In true Apple versus Google fashion, though, the two companies have very different
definitions for this similarly named tool.

On Android, the feature allows you to triple tap your screen to zoom in on whatever is on
your display. This is handy if, for example, you’re using Instagram, which allows you to
pinch-to-zoom in on photos only as long as your fingers are in contact with the screen. As
soon as you let go, the picture will zoom back out. With the Magnification tool, you can
zoom in for as long as you want.

On iOS devices, the Magnifier tool has a different meaning. Instead of zooming in on what’s
on your screen, this tool will use the camera to create a “magnifying glass” to let you look
closer at physical objects. It’s similar to opening your camera app and zooming in manually,
but a lot faster. This tool uses the same triple-tap gesture as the one on Android, though on
older iPhones, it instead uses a triple-click of the home button where available.

Reference:

Eric Ravenscraft, March 24, 2020. Recuperado el 24 de marzo de 2020 partir de

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/24/smarter-living/phone-accessibility-functions.html