How To Customize the Triple-Click iPhone Accessibility Shortcut

When you triple-click the iPhone's Home button, a variety of things can happen. This can trigger the magnifier, screen zoom, a type of dark mode, other screen filters and a few of types of touch assistance. You can have a single function activate instantly, or choose from a menu of more than one function.

Video Transcript: Let's take a look at what's called the Accessibility Shortcut on your iPhone. But you may know it as the triple-click or triple-press. It's what happens when you quickly three times press the Home button on your iPhone or on an iPhone X you quickly press the side button three times. Different people may think different things happen when you do this. That's because you can control what happens. You have the ability to set that in Settings. So let's take a look.
Go into Settings and under General and then Accessibility we're going to go all the way to the bottom and you see Accessibility Shortcut. I'm going to tap that and you can see a list of things and a checkmark next to one of them. So in this case, since there's one checkmark, that's what's going to happen when I triple-press the Home button. In this case it will go to the Magnifier which a lot of people may expect it just uses the camera to show you things on the screen. Kind of like having the camera on but you can zoom in very easily. It's useful for reading like the ingredients on food products and things like that.
But you can add different things to it. For instance, let's add Classic Invert Colors, Smart Invert Colors, and Reduce White Point. When you have all three of these added let's take a look and see what happens. I'll go into Photos here. I'm going to triple-click the Home button and you can see I get a menu now. Instead of going right to the Magnifier, it gives me Magnifier as an option but also the other ones that I chose.
So for instance I can do Classic Invert which you can see inverts the entire screen so all the pictures look funny. Now I can go to Smart Invert which is smart enough to invert parts of the screen like the background there but leave things like photos and icons and such the same. This is kind of like a dark mode for your iPhone. You can also go, like Reduce White Point, is actually going to add on there to the Smart Invert. I'll turn that off and it's going to kind of give me a dimmed view. You can adjust that in Accessibility. I can turn that all off. So you can see I have access to many different things there when I turn on many different things.
Now Magnifier is grayed out which means I can't turn it off. But I can. The key is that I would need to go and find the Magnifier function and actually turn that off itself. So if I turn off Magnifier then that item is now no longer there. Some of the other functions work like that as well. For instance, Guided Access isn't even in the list. But if I turn it on, now it is in the list and grayed out. So there are things like that.
So what do the rest of these do? Well, Color Filters allows you to access a whole bunch of different ways to tint the screen and do things with it. It doesn't show up on Screen Capture so I won't be able to show you that. AssistiveTouch and Switch Control allow you to do all sorts of different things to make it easier to touch the screen for people who have difficulty using a touch screen. Zoom allows you to zoom in in various ways depending upon how you have things checked.
Now many of these things will work depending upon how your Accessibility settings are set. So, for instance, Zoom here there's a bunch of different ways that Zoom can be setup. Same thing for all those touch accessibility options. The colors themselves under Display Accommodations there's color filters and you can check out all the different ways you can do that. So basically a lot of those have additional options but you need to go and find them in the long list of Accessibility options to be able to control what it does.
The important things is that if you always wondered how you set what happens when you triple-click or how you can access multiple options when you triple-click this is where you go to it. You even have the ability, on the right here, to drag the order. So you can change what order these are in so they appear in the menu of maybe the one you use the most closest to the Home button at the bottom of the screen. So check those out. Maybe enable a bunch of them and try using them for a little while to see which ones are useful and then just stick with the ones that you want to keep.

How To Customize the Triple-Click iPhone Accessibility Shortcut

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