Struggling with on-screen keyboard (iphone)

By mr grieves, 30 July, 2021

Forum
iOS and iPadOS

I have an iphone 12 that I am using for testing at work. I am finding the on-screen keyboard a bit of a challenge. I've found the option to speak letters as I press them which is very helpful. But my main problem is with passwords. Because the letter only appears for a second I don't have enough time to read it. And with a combination of fat fingers, double vision, tunnel vision and just a general fuzziness in front of my eyes all the time, I end up making lots of errors.

Does anyone know of anything I can do to help? Maybe there are some other on-screen keyboards I can use. I found one that was a couple of quid but I'm a bit loathe to put my card on a company phone. I do have an unused mac magic keyboard if that can be paired with it (?) but I can't read the keys on it and my touch typing is only ok for letters, not numbers and symbols (which I need for passwords)

Or some way to just turn off password masking. (I think these are system prompts not app prompts and there's no option I can see to do it)

Options

Comments

By Siobhan on Wednesday, August 25, 2021 - 06:23

Apple took away the sound you heard, like a typing click, when a password character was entered. Their sounds for typing anything are soft and personally I hate them and I pray they bring back the louder clicks. Saying this , do you use voice over? I suspect not, but I left on the phonetic pronunciations. So it would be A alpha, B bravo, etc. Maybe it might help you. Don't feel terrible. I have a 12 and I continuously either screw up my password because I'm used to the border, or sheepishly call 911 at four in the morning on more than one occasion.

By Curtis Chong on Wednesday, August 25, 2021 - 06:23

Greetings: Unfortunately, in this situation, the most viable alternative is going to be a real Bluetooth keyboard. I myself often use the Logitech K380, which supports connections for up to three devices.

By Holger Fiallo on Wednesday, August 25, 2021 - 06:23

The click for password still there. Also I am able to select the letters without no issue. I just changed the password for my audible to a very long one and had no issues. Using 12 pro, iOS 14.7.1

By Curtis Chong on Wednesday, August 25, 2021 - 06:23

If a person is not using VoiceOver, you do not receive any audible verification to verify the letter or symbol you are touching. This is a distinct disadvantage, and those of us who use VoiceOver are very happy that we can know what letter or symbol has focus before entering it. Kudos to Apple for getting this part to work.

By Bruce Harrell on Wednesday, August 25, 2021 - 06:23

Hi. My sympathy. There is an alternative or two, though.

One alternative is to type the password somewhere else on your iPhone, such as the message field in a text or email. Then, select it, copy it and thereby have it ready to paste into the password field.

Another alternative is to have whoever gave you your list of passwords copy and paste it into an email and send it to your iPhone, where the passwords will be all ready for copying, and then select one at a time, copy one at a time, and paste one at a time into each password field.

A third alternative is to copy the last phrase spoken by VoiceOver, the last phrase being the password when you read your list of passwords using VoiceOver to read one password at a time, assuming your list of passwords is somewhere on your iPhone already. If your password list is on your Mac or iPad, you can set your devices to share, meaning you would be able to copy on one and paste on the other.

Hope this helps.

Bruce

By mr grieves on Wednesday, August 25, 2021 - 06:23

Thanks for all the replies.

Bruce, for some reason it never occurred to me to try copy/paste. I've always struggled selecting text etc on a mobile but not tried it on the iphone so I'll give that a go.

I'm not using VoiceOver but it's definitely something I mean to play about with.

By mr grieves on Wednesday, August 25, 2021 - 06:23

Think the copy/paste methods works pretty well once I figured out how to actually select text. I feel a bit stupid for not trying it before - think I just got obsessed with trying to use the keyboard properly.

I thought I'd also try turning on VoiceOver and I was surprised at how easy it is to use for simple apps (which is what I'm using for this). I was expecting to have to do battle with it like on the mac before I could do anything productive but perhaps not.

Shame there isn't much help with anything beyond the bare bones (e.g. using Safari) but I guess that can come later.

Quite impressed with my initial play with Siri and Voice Access.