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VoiceOver mysterious text selection / character navigation gestures, anyone know their purpose?

By Nikola Jovic, 21 June, 2022

Forum
iOS and iPadOS

Hello,
so the other day while playing around on my IPhone, I've discovered 4 interesting VoiceOver gestures which are not mentioned anywhere, not assignable in VoiceOver's settings and also don't seem to work correctly. It is a shame, because they look potentially interesting. I was wondering if anybody ever remembers using them and if they worked correctly in the past / had a more meaningful purpose?
Try to put one finger on the screen, and hold it down. While holding that finger on the screen, use two different fingers and swipe up or down with them. Never lift the first finger from the screen.
Assuming you are doing this correctly, VoiceOver should cycle between character selection, word selection, page selection and select all, just like you would be doing if you had text selection enabled in your rotor and were using it, except now you are doing this with a global gesture.
I was hoping maybe I could get rid of it in my rotor and use this instead, but not really, because there is no way to actually perform the chosen selection. Swiping right with just one finger at this point just performs the standard on screen navigation, but then I had a different idea, what about the same gestures, but different direction? So, we would put one finger on the screen again and keep it there, and use two other fingers, but now, instead of swiping up and down, we would swipe left and right.
Turns out this works too, but it does something completely different, it seems to navigate character by character, regardless of the selection method you chose earlier and doesn't actually select anything.

So, as said earlier, does anyone know where these gestures come from? It could actually be really nice if we were able to reassign them, and have even more gestures available, I am thinking something like holding one finger on the screen and using 1, 2 or even 3 others to swipe, possibly even perform taps, although you couldn't really use one finger for that since it would conflict with the split tap feature.

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Comments

I remember at some point…

By Malthe

1 week 4 days ago

I remember at some point there were such gestures for cut, paste etc. They never really seemed to work reliably for me, but if this is an indication, maybe they will again some time?

Best
Malthe

Re: Cut and paste gestures

By Nikola Jovic

1 week 4 days ago

In fact, I also wonder about those.
If you go to VoiceOver's settings/commands/touch gestures, near the bottom, you can find a heading called double tap, hold and flick, 3 fingers.
Here I have 3 finger double tap and hold, then flick left to undo, or flick right to redo. These existed since we got the ability to customize gestures back in iOS 13, but never worked for me, neither on my old IPhone 8 nor on the new 12 pro.

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