Hands-On Apple 246 transcript
Please be advised that this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word-for-word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-free version of the show.
Mikah Sargent [00:00:00]:
All right, open your Settings app and tap Accessibility. Now scroll. Most of what's in here is about control— bigger text, voice commands, new ways to tap and swipe— but mixed in are a handful of switches that don't change what your phone does at all. They change what it's like to have one near you. 4 of them are worth about 90 seconds each, and that's about how long we'll spend. And I think you'll never think about them again right after you turn them on. And then you'll be happy that they're there. That's my hope at least.
Mikah Sargent [00:00:32]:
So let's take a look at finding them. Podcasts you love. From people you trust. This is TWiT. Hello and welcome to Hands On Apple. I am Micah Sargent, and today we are taking a look at some fun and helpful, wonderful, I think, accessibility features that you may not know about. And if you don't know about them, well, I'm introducing them to you because I think they're well worth a try. And the first one is for any of you out there who experience motion sickness, and in particular, motion sickness in a car.
Mikah Sargent [00:01:19]:
If that's you, clock in, lock in, because we're about to talk about something called vehicle motion cues. So Where do we find Vehicle Motion Cues? Well, we launch the Settings app, as you might imagine. We then head into Accessibility, and from here we choose Motion, as you might imagine, and Vehicle Motion Cues. Now, as you can see, if you're watching— if you're not, then I'll tell you what I'm seeing, which is that there's some text beneath the Vehicle Motion Cue setting that says, dots appear near the edges of your iPhone screen. They follow the movement of the vehicle and may help reduce motion sickness. You can turn them on and off in Control Center. So tapping on this gives us an option between on, off, or automatically in vehicle. Automatically in vehicle will wait until it detects motion that probably feels to it like a car or a vehicle of some sort moving, and then will turn on.
Mikah Sargent [00:02:19]:
I recommend having automatically in vehicle turned on. Secondly, you can also customize the appearance. Now, when it comes to this, there are options between regular-sized dots, dynamic dots, The color can be an actual color like green or grayscale, and then you can also— and I love this too— the dots will change in the transparency— or excuse me, saturation— to keep the content behind kind of contrasted, which is really neat. But grayscale is how I typically have it. And then you have an option between larger dots, which will of course Make the dots larger. And more dots, which will add more dots to the screen. Now you can turn on both larger dots and more dots, and it will add more than just what's there. But watch what happens.
Mikah Sargent [00:03:11]:
Well, unfortunately, you will have to follow along with this because it does not show the dots on screen. So following along will give you the ability to see the dots. And if you move the phone around, you'll start to see what these dots are doing. So what is it? Animated dots along the screen edges that move in opposition to the car's motion. So again, opposite of the car's motion, and it does that by listening to essentially the accelerometer and the gyroscope within the phone. Why? Really, really interesting. So it takes a little bit of an understanding of the science and sort of psychology behind car sickness. Uh, Carsickness comes from your inner ear sensing movement that your eyes don't.
Mikah Sargent [00:04:00]:
Okay? So your eyes and your ears are not feeling the same thing. And we believe that the reason this causes motion sickness is because so much of our sort of makeup is based around our time as hunter-gatherers. And so, What did that mean? It meant that you needed to eat food to fuel yourself, which meant that you were more likely to try things that you maybe should not. And so your body has loads of different ways to tell you, hey, I think you might have food poisoning, and so you are hallucinating because you've eaten something poisonous, and so I'm going to make you ill. So the sickness part of that, we believe, comes from This sort of message, mixed message, where what your eyes see and what your ear feels, what your body feels, are off. And that tells the brain, whoa, things are off. I need to make this person sick because they've eaten something that they shouldn't have, and that's why these signals are off. So you can trick your brain by tricking your eyes into believing that the motion matches up with these dots.
Mikah Sargent [00:05:09]:
Now Apple says may help because it doesn't help everyone. I have found that it actually does help me. So that automatic setting again will lock in that it's while you're in the vehicle and it, it does reduce mismatch. I would say that it doesn't quite cure motion sickness and you may need medications or other things depending on how sensitive you are to that, but I found that it helps with those settings for me. All right, the next thing. What about, what about having instead of a tool for knowing that a call is coming in, aka a phone ringtone or a phone notification, a text notification, what if we could have Sensory Alerts. Apple has a page, an accessibility page that's just set up that has a section called Sensory Alerts. Now, despite these both being sort of sensory alerts in the new category, they are a little bit different.
Mikah Sargent [00:06:19]:
So let's start with the first one. What we're going to do is we're going to obviously launch the Settings app and head into Accessibility. And then we want to move down to Audio and visual, and you should see all the way down at the bottom, flash for alerts. Now, this has changed quite a bit, uh, from the original version of how you were able to set up alerts. Originally, you could only make the LED flash on the back of your phone light up, but that has changed now where we have multiple options here. Yes. Being able to switch between the LED flash, The screen, or having both. And you can also set it so that if you're in silent mode, it does not flash.
Mikah Sargent [00:07:07]:
And if you have the phone unlocked, it does not flash or does flash. So right now it says that while it's unlocked, it won't do that flash. While it's in silent mode, it will do the flash because the flash again is not a sound. It's just— A light. A visual. I find it quite nice that the screen has been added to this functionality. That back LED flash was pretty bright, so this is a nice addition. Now let's take a look at the other option that fits in Sensory Alerts.
Mikah Sargent [00:07:41]:
This is found in Settings, and then we go to Sounds and Haptics. Perhaps we go to Sounds and Haptics. And underneath Hearing, so this of course can depend on which of your, which version of iOS you have, but from the Settings app, we scroll down, we get to Sounds and Haptics, and then from here, if we pick an alert type, so Ringtone, and we have it set to Reflection, we can then tap in and make sure that we've got that set to the right one that we're looking for. Up at the top, there's a haptics option, and you can set it to synchronized, which will use the haptic that is tied to the sound. But you can also create a custom vibration. This is one of my favorite things to do when it comes to having special contacts. So if you pick a person, And you edit their ringtone or their text tone, you can assign a pattern that is unique to them. So I have a unique pattern for my significant other so that even when my phone is in my pocket and it's not making sounds, the feel of the notification coming in is different from all other feelings.
Mikah Sargent [00:09:04]:
And so you just simply tap create new vibration and then you tap. to create a vibration, and you can save that and give it a name. So we'll call this Micah. Now I have this custom vibration set up, and you can set this however you want to. You could have it spell out someone's name in Morse code if you wanted to. Very, very nice to be able to set up your own text haptic instead of just a text tone. Now, that said, it does attach to system alert types and contacts, so you cannot set custom vibrations for individual third-party apps. But hey, for messaging, that is still very handy.
Mikah Sargent [00:09:59]:
And, you know, if you want to learn more about the Sounds and Haptics menu, back in episode 209, I covered more about Sounds and Haptics, but that specific feature is This is now part of Apple's Accessibility with Sensory Alerts. Moving along, did you know you already own a white noise machine? Yes, you do. If we go into Settings, we go into Accessibility, and we choose Audio and Visual, you will see an option here that says Background Sounds. This is available on the iPhone, on the iPad, and the Mac. If we tap on Background Sounds, We can choose the sound between balanced noise, bright noise, dark noise, ocean, rain, stream, night, fire, babble, quiet night, bus, boat. So many different options here. Lots and lots of options. And in the next version, or rather in this version in iOS 26, not in the next version, but in iOS 26, you do have the ability to adjust things based on an equalizer.
Mikah Sargent [00:11:07]:
So you can sort of tune it to what you need. You can set it up that way. You can also balance it between the left and the right side. This is really nice. Uh, and especially if you've got something like tinnitus that you're trying to stay focused and you know that the frequency needs to be at a particular, um, setting, this is a great way to do that. Now, there are lots of different options in here. So because I have rain selected, that's the sound that it's playing, but let's do bright noise instead. And you can see it says bright noise volume beneath.
Mikah Sargent [00:11:40]:
So this is a slider for when bright noise is playing on its own, but look at what's happening below it. It says use when media is playing. You can set a separate slider for how quiet or loud it is when you're playing other media. This makes it possible to always have sort of a background sound playing, and we believe— there's a theory essentially that distractible individuals can be helped by— I'm just— distractible in a neurodiverse sense can be helped by having a consistent sound going on in the background. So keeping this on while other media playing is really handy. You can also set it to stop when there's a timer. and also set it to stop when the phone gets locked, which is very handy. In order to access your background sounds, you can, in Control Center, tap and hold, and you'll notice that there's our new vehicle motion cues option in Control Center.
Mikah Sargent [00:12:42]:
But tapping and holding and choosing Add Control, and if we type in, in the search controls, background, we can see there's background sounds. And now that's accessible via our Control Center currently set to bright noise as we have it in the settings. You know, it's probably not going to be as full-featured as a white noise app, but the fact that all of these are right here, that they're available for free, and that they blend so well and seamlessly with the rest of your content, with whatever you're watching, that's what really sets this apart. All right, let's go to our final setting that I think is a really cool one for a period of time. This is also in Accessibility. You scroll down and you choose Music Haptics. With Music Haptics, it uses the Taptic Engine, which of course is the vibration motor inside of the phone, to Let you feel sort of the rhythm of the music through taps and vibrations that are going on in the body of your phone. So it listens to music and processes that music and then plays a vibration pattern that is meant to give you a representation, a physical representation of the music.
Mikah Sargent [00:14:10]:
This is rhythm accents, texture, uh, within music so that you can kind of experience it that way. With this, if we turn it on, we have some different options including full mix, which will match the rhythm, beat, and energy of the entire song, or vocals only, which will use vocals or vocal-like melodies as the means of doing this. And you can change the intensity between light, medium, and strong, as well as some third-party apps You can make use of the music haptics feature in those third-party apps. Not every phone has this. It does require an iPhone 12 or later that is running iOS 18 or newer. That means the iPhone SE is excluded. And because your iPad, your Mac do not have Taptic Engines, it cannot do it on there and it cannot do it on your Apple Watch, likely because of battery constraints. So Apple Music, Apple Music Classical, Shazam, uh, all work with Music Haptics.
Mikah Sargent [00:15:14]:
There is that developer API, as I mentioned, so that's where the available apps could change. But as it stands, Spotify, YouTube Music, Amazon Music don't have that turned on yet. Maybe that'll change in the future, we'll see. Something that's kind of nice is that when you're in the middle of a song, you can swipe down in Control Center and tap the music haptics icon to turn it on or turn it off. If you see an icon that shows it, uh, with a slash through it, that means that it is unavailable for that particular song. Of course, this was built for people who are deaf or hard of hearing and is a way to kind of enjoy a song in a way that otherwise they would not be able to. It is not meant to be a novelty. But it is also kind of fun.
Mikah Sargent [00:16:02]:
And so you can turn it on if you'd like, uh, with the knowledge that it is a pretty battery-heavy, uh, feature, given that it needs to constantly, uh, send those taps through the Taptic Engine. All right, let's wrap this up with a little bit of homework for you. You know, pick one of these features, turn it on before you close your Settings app, and then if you read in the car, That could be the person who turns on vehicle motion cues. If you miss texts, maybe you should flash, have your phone flash for alerts. If your house is loud, or if you struggle with distractibility, background sounds. If you've never felt a song, music haptics. Try it out for a week. Notice maybe that you stop noticing it.
Mikah Sargent [00:16:52]:
Notice that you continue to notice it, but you enjoy it every time. I mean, that's the whole point, right? And hey, look, these do live in the accessibility menu because they were built for people who need them. Someone who can't hear the notification or gets sick reading in a car. But just be mindful that they are pleasant for everyone else. But that's kind of a bonus, right? It's not the reason that they exist in the first place. So find joy in them if you can. And if not, that's all right. Move right along.
Mikah Sargent [00:17:26]:
Folks, thank you so much for tuning into this week's episode of Hands On Apple. I appreciate you for being here. I'll be back next week, but until then, it is time to say— Goodbye.
