How to Use Your iPhone as a Magnifying Glass

Here is a guide on how to Use Your iPhone as a Magnifying Glass using the new iOS 10 Accessibility features. Apple has always kept those with accessibility needs in mind when designing their hardware and software and the iOS has a wealth of features to assist those customers.

One of the best features of the Accessibility tools is the Magnifier feature which will allow you to utilize your iPhone’s camera to magnify anything you need to read. Often we have ridiculously small print on food labels, in newspapers or even just reading a book and the iPhone can help you immensely with just a few taps!

How to Use Your iPhone as a Magnifying Glass

Here are the steps to enable the Magnifier on your iPhone.

Watch the above video to see how to access your iPhone’s Accessibility settings.

Enable the Magnifier

In order to access this hidden feature of iOS 10, you need to access your iPhone’s accessibility features by navigating to the Settings app, General and then the Accessibility tab.

You will see a wealth of options for Accessibility including sections for Vision, Interaction, Hearing, Media and Learning. For our needs we will access the Vision section and tap Magnifier.

The Magnifier will have a slider that you can enable and doing so will now allow you to utilize the camera as a magnifying glass in order to see those hard to read text printings. In order to use this feature now that it is enabled, we must learn a new gesture for our iPhone

Using the Magnifier

Now that we have this setting enabled we can use the Magnifier for our reading needs by triple-clicking the Home button from any screen. When you do this, you will see a window appear for your camera to be used as well as a few different icons at the bottom of the screen.

You can tap the larger circle to freeze frame the current displayed image, Lock the focus, Zoom in and out and change the color temperature all within this screen.

You can snap a freeze frame and then alter colors further by tapping the Filters icon. You will be able to see multiple combinations of colors that may potentially enhance your zoomed image further and make it easier to read.

The magnifier is an excellent resource for all users as we often need assistance reading things that are very small for our human eyes. In addition to being a genuinely great accessibility tool, this is yet another feature of the iPhone that can come in handy for all owners throughout our days.

What's New in iOS 11.4.1

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The iOS 11.4 update added Messages in iCloud and AirPlay 2, but it also brought issues along with it. The iOS 11.4.1 update keeps these long anticipated features and includes fixes for some iOS 11.4 problems.  Specifically the iOS 11.4.1 update; Fixes an issue that prevented some users from viewing the last known location of their AirPods in Find My iPhone.  Improves reliability of syncing mail, contacts and notes with Exchange accounts.   This update also includes other bug fixes and security upgrades. It's possible that this update includes a fix for bad iOS 11.4 battery life.  Messages in the Cloud allows you to backup your iMessage conversations to the cloud just like you back up your notes, contacts and photos. This means they are backed up in case something happens to your phone, but that's not all.  Messages in the Cloud syncs deleted messages and threads across your iCloud devices. This means everything will show up the same across your Apple devices. With this in place you should see the same conversations everywhere, all of the time.  This also backs up the photos and attachments in the cloud so you have more room on your iPhone or iPad. When you get a new device all of the messages sync to that device so you don't lose anything.

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