Best accessibility features for Android and iPhone

Your smartphone’s operating system accompanies a lot of incredible accessibility features intended to improve life for individuals who have low vision, mobility issues, or hearing difficulties. On the off chance that you have any of these issues, or know somebody who faces them, it’s great to monitor valuable accessibility features that could help them — however, they are important to be familiar with regardless of whether you don’t, as they can help you discover better ways to perform common tasks on your phone. Below, we’ve gathered the best of these features on both Android and iPhone, in one helpful list.

Where are accessibility settings on Android and iPhone?

Almost the entirety of the features intended for individuals with disabilities is situated in the Settings > Accessibility menu on both Android and iPhone. While we will talk about the best of these features, we can’t possibly cover every single option out there. That is the reason we urge you to investigate this settings page and search for other specific features you’ll discover supportive — however, know that some of them will work just when you interface an accessibility accessory like a Braille keyboard.

The best accessibility features for those with low vision

There are a few helpful features on the two platforms for clients with low vision. The most significant of these is a Screen Reader feature. As the name recommends, it configures your phone to read out what’s written on the screen. From the text in articles to the text used across the operating system, the screen reader feature is monstrously valuable for those with low vision.

You can enable this alternative on iPhone under Settings > Accessibility > VoiceOver. On Android, head to Settings > Accessibility > TalkBack.

The Magnifier is another superb iPhone feature in such a manner. It uses your phone’s camera to allow you to zoom into things in your surroundings and view them very close, similar to a magnifying glass. You can rapidly change colors and differences to change the image to make it simpler to see whatever you’re attempting to see. To colours in iOS, go to Settings > Accessibility > Magnifier.

Shockingly, Android doesn’t have a comparable feature built-in, however, you can utilize the camera app to zoom in manually, or attempt a third-party magnifier app like Magnifying Glass + Flashlight.

It’s additionally useful to all around the world to adjust the text size and colors on your cell phone’s screen to suit your requirements. On an iPhone, go to Settings > Accessibility > Display & Text Size to make these changes; you’ll likewise discover here valuable options for individuals with color vision lacks, for example, Color Filters that permit you to make it simpler to differentiate colors. On Android, comparative alternatives are found in Settings > Accessibility under the Display sub-head.

The best accessibility features for those who are hard of hearing or deaf

In case you are hard of hearing or almost deaf, your cell phone has lots of valuable accessibility features to help you.

The most significant of them is Live Transcribe, which is built into Google’s Pixel line of smartphones and is additionally accessible as an app on Google Play Store for other Android smartphones. Live Transcribe automatically perceives sounds around you and converts them into text. It supports various languages, and above all, can make you aware of certain non-speech sounds around you, similar to a crying baby or a smoke or fire alarm. The notifications show up either as a flashing light or a vibration, which makes it simple to avoid missing important alerts.

While iPhone doesn’t have a comparable built-in app, you can attempt third-party options like Hearing Helper and Live Transcribe. Some of these features are accessible through iPhone’s sound recognition feature, which you can configure by going to Settings > Accessibility > Sound Recognition. Assuming you want a LED flash for alerts, you can configure that under Audio/Visual in your Accessibility settings.

On the off chance that you face hearing loss in one ear, you should give enabling Mono Audio a shot on your smartphone. Stereo audio sometimes places a part of the sound recorded in the left channel and another part in the right. Changing to mono sound guarantees that the whole audio is accessible in a single channel, so you can place your earphones in a single ear and not miss out on anything.

On iPhone, you can enable this under Settings > Accessibility > Audio/Visual > Mono Audio. On Android, this alternative is under the Audio and On-Screen Text area in Settings > Accessibility.

The best accessibility features for individuals with motor skill issues

On the off chance that you face physical trouble, for example, motor skill impairment, there are some extraordinary alternatives on both Android and iPhone that can make using your phone simpler. The AssistiveTouch button became truly popular some time ago when individuals used to stress over sticky iPhone home buttons, and it stays an extraordinary accessibility feature in the buttonless iPhone period, permitting you to map useful features — say, taking screenshots, using the pinch gesture, or launching the camera — to a single onscreen button.

You can enable this feature by going to Settings > Accessibility > Touch > AssistiveTouch on iPhone. On the same page, go to Customize Top Level Menu to add or remove activities mapped to this button. You may likewise configure what happens when you tap the AssistiveTouch button once, twice, or long-press it on the AssistiveTouch page under the following menus: Single-Tap, Double-Tap, and Long-Press.

On Android, you can enable the Accessibility Menu to get comparative features. Go to Settings > Accessibility and select Accessibility Menu under the Interaction Controls sub-head.

You ought to likewise consider enabling a shortcut to automatically answer phone calls after a pre-configured duration. On iPhone, head over to Settings > Accessibility > Touch > Call Audio Routing. Here you can select which device will play audio from a call, so if you prefer using a Bluetooth headset or a speaker, you can route call audio directly to that. You can likewise set a duration for automatically answering phone calls on this settings page.

A comparable alternative is accessible on some Android cell phones, yet not every one of them. You can search for it by opening the Dialer app, hitting the three-dots icon in the top-right corner, and selecting Settings. On the off chance that the feature is accessible on your phone, you’ll see it under call settings.

At last, dictation is an excellent feature that permits you to talk as opposed to typing. On iPhone, you can enable it under Settings > General > Keyboard > Enable Dictation. A microphone icon will show up on both the keyboard and in text fields, and you can hit it and begin speaking. The phone will then, at that point convert your speech to text.

On Android, dictation is enabled by default. You can hit the microphone icon in the text box or simply above the keyboard to use the speech-to-text feature.