I’m an iPhone user and have been since the iPhone 5. I have always been happy with their accessibility features and I know the operating system inside and out, so I stay with iPhones because I’m comfortable with them and can easily navigate. Because of the maturity of the platform, innovative features seem exceedingly rare especially in terms of accessibility. Most companies require you to buy the latest greatest hardware to get new features, but not so with the really great back tap feature in iOS 14. In your settings under accessibility > touch you can now activate the back tap feature which allows you to double or triple tap on the back of your phone to activate a feature. You can set up the double and triple tap to activate separate features as well. 

Like most of you that frequent this blog, I use a screen reader. On iOS you slide two fingers down from the top of the screen to activate the screen reader function. Most times when I’m in a hurry, I end up bringing up the notifications or some other function instead of activating the screen reader. With the new back tap feature I set the double tap to activate screen reader and it has made the phone 100% more useable for me and makes the screen reader function orders of magnitude more reliable. You can also set the back tap feature to activate zoom, mute the phone bring up spotlight or a myriad of other options. 

The back tap uses the accelerometer in your phone and works very well on my older iPhone X, my son has a iPhone 8 and it works equally well. The options you can set the feature to are a bit limited as of right now but I’m sure it will expand with time and future releases. 

There isn’t much more to say about this new feature other than I’m interested to hear if you are using it and what you think ab out it. Drop me a message and let me know.