How to Hear the Time Every Minute

By Jessica Brown, 23 November, 2012

If you want a quick way to time something and you do not care about it being perfectly accurate but you do not want to have to go in to the clock app and set a timer, alarm or stopwatch, just single finger single tap on or swipe to the part of the statice bar that says the time. VoiceOver will say the time every minute. Note that because the iOS clock does not do seconds, when you first start timing, you will not know what second of the minute you are starting timing at, but after that you will get full minutes. Also, at the time you want to stop timing, you will not know what second it is at unless the timing stopps at the very end of the minute. However, all the minutes in the middle will be counted fully. The only ones that will not be counted are the ones at the beginning and end. So if you are trying to time something you will only be off by up to 120 seconds, which is 2 minutes. To make it stop, just single finger single tap on or single finger swipe to anywhere on the screen except for the part of the status bar that says the time and it will stop saying the time. Another thing you could use this for is to not lose track of time when you need to leave home or do something at a certain time. You will not lose track of time if your iOS device is constently telling you the time. To make sure this will work, leave your screen unlocked and set auto-lock to never.

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Comments

By frank perry on Friday, December 21, 2012 - 18:56

Hi. Thank you for this discovery. Ok this works so no problems with that, be sure to have your auto lock set to never and in my case I still had to turn the phone now and then to stop the screen locking even with auto lock set to never. The thing is for the first minute you don't exactly get a full 60 seconds so 3 minutes could actually turn out to be nearly 4, because you have to hear voice over say the time 3 times for 3 minutes, or it could be 3 minutes 22 seconds. Again, this is a brilliant feature and I've learnt something new about my iPhone so thank you for this guide, but if you want exact timers, the clock and timers are still the way to go.

By Jessica Brown on Friday, December 21, 2012 - 18:56

I am sorry! I guess I did not think about that first minute thing when I made the guide. I guess the only way you would get the whole minute the first time around would be if you started timeing on the first second of the minute, but because the clocks on the iOS devices do not display seconds, you can not be sure at what second in the minute you are starting at. If you do not care about exact time then I think it is still a good way to measure time approximately.

By Levi Gobin on Monday, September 30, 2024 - 18:56

I’ve done this before when I knew I needed to leave an area by a certain time.
Assigning the watch item command to a voice over gesture allows you to watch the time, then move your focus elsewhere.
For me, a 1 finger quadruple tap watches the current item. If it changes, voiceover should speak it immediately, unless you’re reading something, Or voiceover is speaking anything else. A watched item should speak after Voiceover finishes reading the current item.