New Braille screen input is certainly interesting in iOS 18. There are sounds and haptics now, which is long overdue. You invoke Braille screen input with a gesture now, rather than using the rotor. The default gesture is a two-finger double-tap near the edges of the screen. I had trouble with the left and right edges, and didn't realize at first that the fingers needed to be separated, rather than tapping on one particular edge. I've found the top and bottom is most reliable, which basically means I turn the phone to BSI orientation and type cc. However, as with everything else, the gesture can be reassigned.
You can now activate it anywhere on the system and use it like a quick item chooser, jumping straight to something by typing part of its name. There are new gestures for editing and selecting text, and I'm using them to clean up this post.
There's an entire new mode called "command mode", and you can switch between command and typing mode with a three-finger swipe left or right. In command mode, the phone invokes Braille display commands as though you added a space. So, dots 1 or 4 will move between items, h will go home, and b will go back. It seems Apple is trying to provide us with an entirely new way to navigate the OS, and it already seems pretty powerful for a dev beta 1. I'm going to send this post by going into command mode, pressing l to jump to the top of the screen, pressing dot 4 to get to the send button, and pressing dots 3-6. The two-finger flick right would also work. I'm not sure which feels more natural yet.
@simon Oh good, so you can reassign the gesture to activate it. I was slightly concerned about the new method
@MariahL You can also turn the phone to landscape and then tap twice with both pointer fingers. Turns out top and bottom is way more reliable than left and right, for some reason.
@simon Forget what it says about the edges of the screen and do it at the top and bottom of the screen instead. Works 100 percent of the time for me.
@simon Have you tried rearranging the home screen?
@simon I'm loving what they've done with Braille screen input. This command mode is very powerful.
@simon That all sounds very interesting! My major issue with braille screen input at the moment is that sometimes when I'm typing, I get kicked out of BSI especially if I'm doing a lot of backspacing. Not sure if it's a bug or if I'm doing something wrong, but yeah I do think navigating the OS like this will be interesting if I can keep stuff like that from happening.
@musicalman Is it only when you're deleting words? Sometimes I notice my phone trying to interpret my swipes as a rotor gesture. If one finger moves more than the other finger, you'll rotor out of BSI. That might be better with iOS 18. It hasn't happened for me since I had an SE, which really was worse at interpreting my gestures.
@simon Yeah, pretty sure words are the big issue. Makes sense if it's a false roder action. I guess I was just confused since someone was trying to tell me there was a scrub gesture that didn't start working until IOS 16 or 17 or something, and suggesting that was the cause of my issue. After that I was a little confused and quit trying to figure it out. Lol
@simon I have to play with the text navigation and selection commands more. I know we've had them in some form for years, but I never quite got into using them for some reason. It sounds like they've been simplified now.
@simon I'm obsessed with the sounds in BSI on iOS 18. I can't stop typing now LOL. I did have difficulty with invoking BSI via the new gesture, so I reassigned it to a 4 finger single tap. I've also been playing around with with the commands. thanks for these tips, I'm gonna try them :-). .
@morganlynn1992 Try the cc trick. The idea is that you tap two fingers as far apart as possible. Since you already need to have the phone turned to landscape, you can just turn the phone before you invoke BSI, tap twice with your pointer fingers, and it should work. It's extremely reliable for me.
@simon Can’t wait to try this out when beta 2 comes out! :)
@simon Ah! Thanks for these tips. I started playing with it last night but getting out of BSI mode has been a bit challenging. I'll give this a try for sending later today.
@simon that sounds really neat, I'm not a beta tester, my iphone is my primary device and I don't have any other phones to test it on, so I'll have to wait till 18 comes out. But the new braille features sound absolutely amazing.