In this episode, Shaun Preece discusses how to supercharge apps on an iPhone using Apple Shortcuts. He explains that apps are what enable blind individuals to do various tasks on their smartphones, and Apple Shortcuts allows users to create scripts to automate app functions. Shaun walks through the step-by-step process of setting up shortcuts and assigning gestures to activate them. He demonstrates how to create a shortcut for the Be My Eyes app and assign a two-finger swipe to activate it. Shaun emphasizes the convenience and power of using shortcuts to make apps more accessible and efficient.
In this episode, Shaun Preece discusses how to supercharge apps on an iPhone using Apple Shortcuts. He explains that apps are what enable blind individuals to do various tasks on their smartphones, and Apple Shortcuts allows users to create scripts to automate app functions. Shaun walks through the step-by-step process of setting up shortcuts and assigning gestures to activate them. He demonstrates how to create a shortcut for the Be My Eyes app and assign a two-finger swipe to activate it. Shaun emphasizes the convenience and power of using shortcuts to make apps more accessible and efficient.
Highlights
- [Announcer] "Shaun of the Shed," an AMI original podcast.
- Hello, and welcome back to another episode of "Shaun of the Shed." I'm Shaun Preece, and today I'm excited. I think what we're gonna talk about today, what I'm gonna show you today is just gonna be really cool for a lot of you out there. The smartphone has changed our lives, right? It enables us to do so many things as blind people that we couldn't do otherwise. But it's not the smartphone that does that. It's the apps. Apps are amazing, be it Seeing AI; or Envision that allows us to read, let's say, printed text or even handwritten text for that matter; or Be My Eyes, allowing us to get sighted assistance through a video call; or using Be My AI feature, the ability to take a picture and get full detailed descriptions of whatever our camera sees. They're amazing. But did you know there's a way to supercharge apps on your iPhone? Yep. Sorry, Android users. I'm talking to iPhone users today. But honestly, this is just so cool and so convenient. So what am I talking about? Well, let's say, for example, a two-finger swipes at the right will take a picture and give you that full detailed description from Be My Eyes, but without you having to swipe through and open the app and get to the right place, it just does it automatically just with one gesture. Or let's say a two-finger swipe to the left we'll start up seeing AI and take you directly to the currency identifier, or the color identifier, or short text or whatever channel or feature you want to use. Again, all with one gesture. It's amazing. It makes apps even more convenient and easy to use. Now, the magic sauce, how you make this happen is through something called Apple Shortcuts. Apple Shortcuts is a bit of a beast of an app, especially for voiceover users, and it can be a little bit daunting to use. But what I'm gonna do today is walk you through step by step how to supercharge your apps and set up these feature gestures. And actually it's pretty easy once you know what you've got to listen out for. So let's just jump straight into it. Let's supercharge our apps using Apple Shortcuts. So what the hell is Apple Shortcuts? Well, I'm glad you asked. Apple Shortcuts is just an app. Simple as that. Unless you've got a really old device, chances are Apple Shortcuts is already there right now on your iPhone. It's also available for the iPad, by the way, but I've never tried it. But hey, give it a go. Let me know how you get on. Now, the whole point of Apple Shortcuts is to create scripts. Now already, I know I'm losing lots of you already. Don't worry about this. As I mentioned, Apple Shortcuts is a beast of an app. There's just so much in it. And as a voiceover user, you know what? It's a little bit inconsistent. It's not a great experience, to be honest. But as I said, let's not worry about that. I'm not gonna go through and show you what every single little thing does in Apple Shortcuts because, well, we'd be here for years. But what I am gonna do is just show you step by step how to get this task done. And honestly, it is pretty straightforward once you know what you're listening out for. So Apple Shortcuts, how do we open it? It will be on your home screen somewhere if you've got anything with iOS 13 or above. So just swipe through until you find Apple Shortcuts. Or it may even just be called Shortcuts. I can't remember now. And double tap, or far easier, just ask Siri to do it. Say Siri, open Shortcuts. Okay, so we're now in the Shortcuts app. Let me put my headphones on so I can hear my phone. The first thing we need to do is go to the very bottom of the screen
- [Voiceover] Tab bar automation, tab two of three.
- Now at the bottom of the screen you'll find, I think it's three tabs. The one we want to be in is the very first one, which is-
- [Voiceover] Selected Shortcuts, tab one of three.
- Shortcuts. Now, again, I'm not gonna go through everything here and explain what each thing does. But if you wanna have a play around, feel free. You can't do any harm really. I'm just going to double tap on Shortcuts, even though it says it's selected already.
- [Voiceover] Selected Shortcuts, tab one of three.
- Cool. Now let's go right up to the top of the screen. To quickly jump up there, I'm going to tap on the top of the screen with four fingers.
- [Voiceover] Shortcuts, back button.
- Okay, now let's just swipe to the right with one finger until we hear-
- [Voiceover] All shortcuts, heading, select, button, create shortcut, button.
- Create shortcut. That's what we want to do. Double tap.
- [Voiceover] Shortcuts, back button, new shortcut one, actions menu, button.
- Okay, again, there's so much on here, but the one thing we wanna listen out for, I will point out in just a second. I'm gonna swipe through again with one finger to the right, but there's quite a few things. Here we go.
- [Voiceover] Done, button. Actions, create a shortcut, add action button. Next, action suggestions button. Next, action suggestions.
- Keep going.
- [Voiceover] Open up, button. Play music, button. Actions controller, minimized. Actions available.
- Thank you. That's why I'm listening out for: actions controller minimized. Now, let's double tap on that.
- [Voiceover] Actions controller, half screen.
- Half screen. That's not good enough, trust me. Let's double tap on it again.
- [Voiceover] Actions controller, full screen.
- Full screen, that's what you want it to say. The reason I need full screen is because in half screen mode, I find that voiceover tends to get a little bit lost and the options change. So in full screen, we know exactly where we're at. Now we're here, let's swipe through again.
- [Voiceover] Action library, search for apps and actions. Search field.
- Keep going.
- [Voiceover] Dictate button.
- And again.
- [Voiceover] Selected, categories, button one of two.
- One of two. Swipe on.
- [Voiceover] Apps button, two of two.
- Apps. That's what we want. Let's double tap on that. Selected apps, two of two.
- This app's category or apps tab, whatever you wanna call it, will now show us a list of every app I've got installed on my iPhone. And we can choose one of these and then choose a function of one of those apps that we want to use. So let's have a quick look through, again, swiping through.
- [Voiceover] Apps. 1Timer, button.
- 1Timer, very cool.
- [Voiceover] Aira Explorer, button.
- Oh, of course.
- [Voiceover] Airchat, button, Amazon button.
- I'm just swiping through.
- [Voiceover] App Store, button, Audible, button, Be My Eyes, button.
- Of course, that's our favorite. So let's have a look what features we can use in here. Let's double tap.
- [Voiceover] Be My Eyes. Actions controller, full screen. actions available.
- Okay, again, I'm just gonna swipe through the options here.
- [Voiceover] Be My Eyes, heading, close, button, call volunteer.
- Okay, nice. Obvious. Next.
- [Voiceover] Ask question.
- I don't know what a lot of these options do, but again, feel free to have a play. Try them out, see what they do. So I wanna go to.
- [Voiceover] Describe fully.
- Describe Fully. So what this does is automatically takes a picture and gives you the most detailed description of it. Let's choose that one. I'm gonna double tap.
- [Voiceover] Describe fully.
- Now, once you double tap, it goes back to the previous screen. You don't need to do anything. All we're looking out for is at the top right corner of the screen.
- [Voiceover] Next actions, describe, done, button.
- Done. There we go. Let's double tap on done.
- [Voiceover] Done. Shortcuts, back button.
- And now we're back where we started. If I swipe through.
- [Voiceover] All shortcuts, heading, select, button, create shortcut, button, search, search field, dictate, button.
- I'm still swiping through with one finger.
- [Voiceover] Describe with Be My AI, one action, button. Actions available.
- Describe with Be My AI. That's the shortcut we've just created. I know, we just created a shortcut. It was as easy as that. Now, to start that shortcut, activate it, I could simply ask Siri and say the shortcut name Describe with Be My AI, and it would run that shortcut. But we are going to do more than that. As I mentioned right at the start, I wanna assign a quick gesture to start that shortcut, and that's what we're gonna do next. That was step one. Let's go on to step two. So we've created our first shortcut. That was fairly simple, wasn't it? And feel free to go through the list of apps that are available on your iPhone and see what you can do with them. There's really quite a lot in there. But anyway, we've created our first one. So what do we do now? Well, we need to go into our accessibility settings. So you can either swipe around until you find settings, double tap, and then swipe through to accessibility and double tap, or far easier, just as Siri to open accessibility settings. Okay, so now we're in the Settings app, and we should be in the accessibility part. Let me just swipe through.
- [Voiceover] Accessibility, heading.
- Yes, we are. Now what we want to go to is the voiceover option. So swipe through again, just swiping to the right with one finger.
- [Voiceover] Vision, heading, VoiceOver on, button.
- That's what I want. Double tap.
- [Voiceover] VoiceOver, switch button, on.
- Now, what I'm looking for is an option called commands. I'm just gonna swipe through, bear with me.
- [Voiceover] Voiceover speaks, tap once to select, double tap to learn more. Link, commands, button.
- There it is. Let's double tap on that.
- [Voiceover] All commands, button.
- Actually, the very first item is the one that I want, all commands. Let's double tap on that.
- [Voiceover] Interaction button.
- Okay, now there's quite a few options in this list. The one I want is Shortcuts. And actually it's right at the very end. So again, bear with me as I swipe on through
- [Voiceover] Basic navigation, text navigation, advanced navigation, editing button, rotor button, scrolling button, shortcuts button.
- There it is. Double tap.
- [Voiceover] Describe with Be My AI button.
- And there is, there's the shortcut that we created earlier. So if that's the one I wanna select, double tap.
- [Voiceover] Touch gestures, heading.
- Now, we've got a choice. We can assign that to a touch gesture. Let me just swipe on.
- [Voiceover] Add gesture button. keyboard shortcuts, heading.
- Or you can assign it to a keyboard shortcut. So if you've got an external keyboard that you use with your iPhone, you can have a keyboard shortcut to trigger that shortcut. That could be quite cool, but I'm gonna stick with a touch gesture. So I'm just gonna swipe back just to the left with one finger.
- [Voiceover] Add gesture, button.
- And again, I'm gonna add a touch gesture. It's double tap.
- [Voiceover] Cancel button.
- Oh, there's a lot of lists in this bit. So now if I swipe through.
- [Voiceover] touch gestures, heading.
- We're gonna have a big list of all the touch gestures available on your iPhone. Now, one thing I will say is just be a little bit careful here. You don't want to assign this shortcut to a single-finger double tap and lose the ability to activate anything. You can save yourself from this, but just be careful of what you're selecting. Now, I'm going to assign this shortcut to a two-finger swipe to the right. I'm gonna jump through this list by heading. So let me make sure I've got that selected.
- [Voiceover] Words, speaking rate, 55%, screen recognition, headings.
- Headings. And now I'm just gonna jump through this list and find the two-finger swipe gesture.
- [Voiceover] Tap, one finger heading, tap, two fingers heading, tap, three fingers heading.
- As you can hear, the list is broken up into the various gestures. This is the taps. I don't want that. I want swipes. Swipe down with one finger.
- [Voiceover] Tap, four fingers, heading. Swipe, one finger, heading.
- Oh, nearly there.
- [Voiceover] Swipe two-fingers heading.
- That's what I want. Okay, so now let's just swipe through this list as we would normally.
- [Voiceover] Two-finger swipe left, two-finger swipe right.
- two-finger swipe right. Now, I'm gonna double tap on this in a second, but I've already got something else assigned to two-finger swipe to the right, and it will warn me about that. So let's have a quick look.
- [Voiceover] Triple tap the back of your iPhone. Two-finger's alert, gesture in use.
- Yes it is.
- [Voiceover] The gesture is assigned to another command. Move to next heading.
- Now, normally I have the swipe left or right with two fingers to jump to previous or next heading. But for now, let's assign that shortcut to this gesture.
- [Voiceover] Cancel button, assign button.
- Sign, double tap. And it's not telling me anything. Let's swipe around and see where we are.
- [Voiceover] Commands are prefixed with the voiceover modifier key. Commands are prefixed with the add keyboard shortcut button.
- Oh, and we've finished and it's gone back to the previous screen. That's it. We are done. How easy was that? And of course, you could have gone through any one of those gestures in that list and chosen any one of them. There are quite a few gestures available that are not assigned to anything, two-finger swipe left or right being one of them. But there's some gestures that you may never use. For example, is it a four-finger triple tap or a quadruple tap that brings on voiceover help? And I don't need that. But have a look through, double check you are assigning it to the correct gesture and you're not getting rid of a gesture that you really need, but it is pretty straightforward. Now, come on, how cool was that? It opened the app, it took the picture and gave me the description without me having to swipe through a multiple amount of times. It just did it by performing one gesture. Now, if you think back to that list of apps, as I mentioned right at the start of this video, you can assign any gesture to pretty much any function of any app. So I do have Seeing AI, the short text feature to read my text of anything I've got in front of me assigned to a gesture. I've also got another one for Voice Vista assigned to a back tap. That's something I should have shown you actually. If you go to settings, accessibility and touch, in there, you'll find an option called back tap. Now, you can assign a shortcut to either double tapping the back of your phone, I know the back of your phone, weird, or triple tapping the back of your phone, and that will activate a shortcut. It really is a really powerful feature and it's just, it makes the smartphone just so convenient to use, especially if you've got a feature that you use all the time, such as taking a picture and getting a description. I hope that helped and let me know how you get on with it. You can email me, Shaun@doubletaponair.com or leave a comment below. If you like this video, please hit that like button. And if you haven't done already, why not subscribe? Thank you so much for watching, and I will see you next time.