The rotor, VoiceOver's multi-purpose tool

What is the rotor?

The rotor is a VoiceOver gesture that gives access to a large number of settings and actions; many of these are available only through the rotor gesture. It can be used to change the speed and volume of VoiceOver speech; it can allow you to read through text line by line, word by word or even character by character so you can be sure of the spelling; the rotor even allows you to select handwriting as your method of text input. There is much more that the rotor can do, including being an essential text editing tool. 

It may help to think of the rotor as a clock face with options arranged around the dial. A clockwise or anti-clockwise rotor gesture allows you to move clockwise or anti-clockwise around the dial until you reach the item you want. 

The rotor gesture

Apple describes the rotor gesture as "rotate two fingers on the screen around a point between them". You may find it easier to use a thumb and finger or you may even  prefer to use two hands. Another approach is to place two fingers on the screen and then rotate the phone. (This probably isn't practical on a tablet.) The rotation doesn't need to be a big move; you wil probably find that a small rotary movement is sufficient. Please experiment in VoiceOver practice to discover what works best for you. 

Some people find the rotor gesture impossible to perform.  Fortunately, all VoiceOver gestures can be reassigned to alternative gestures and a good choice for most people is to assign the clockwise and anti-clockwise rotor gestures to a two finger swipe right and left. The default use of these two finger swipe gestures is for grouped navigation, a feature which many VoiceOver users  don't turn on and isn't currently covered on this website.  

The settings to redefine the rotor gestures can be found in Settings / Accessibility / VoiceOver / Commands / Touch Gestures. Redefine two finger swipe right to next rotor and two finger swipe left to previous rotor. Please seek assistance if necessary; it's easy to do damage in this area of Settings but if you suspect you have blundered then it's easy to reset all VoiceOver commands back to their original settings at Settings / Accessibility / VoiceOver / Commands / Reset VoiceOver Commands.

If you use grouped navigation and have difficulty with the standard rotor gesture another alternative is to set the rotor gestures as backtap gestures with a double tap on the back of your phone being set to next rotor and a triple back tap being set to previous rotor. It should be possible to do this in VoiceOver Command Settings. I've tried this and although I've successfully assigned the rotor gestures to back taps the back taps have no effect on my iPhone. I'll investigate with Apple Accessibility. By all means try. It may work for you.

Rotor Items

The items that are arranged around the rotor dial change depending on what you are doing at the time; they vary with the context.

You are in control of which items can appear on your rotor dial. There is a Rotor Items setting in Settings > Accessibility > VoiceOver > Rotor where you can change the items that may appear when you use the rotor gesture to turn the dial. A trainer may have set that up for you but, if you are confident, you can change these settings to add some items you need and certainly to remove items you don't use. It will speed things up if you only have items you regularly need to use on your rotor. It is also possible to change the order of items on your rotor dial here so you can more quickly access the items you use most. If you know the name of a rotor item you wish to add or remove you can go quickly to it using the search field near bottom centre of the screen.

Using the rotor gesture

When the rotor gesture is used to select a specific rotor item , with few exceptions, it determines the effect of a one finger vertical swipe up or down until the rotor position is changed. 

For a simple example, you can explore  how the rotor can be used to change the speed at which VoiceOver talks. Rotate the rotor clockwise until you hear "speaking rate". If you overshoot, turn the rotor in the opposite direction or go all the way round the dial clockwise again if you find that easier. With the rotor set to speaking rate, swipe up with one finger to make VoiceOver speak faster and swipe down with one finger to make VoiceOver speak more slowly. The volume rotor setting similarly controls the volume of VoiceOver speech relative to the main volume setting. If you are new to VoiceOver you may be prone to accidental swipes so it is sensible to rotate your rotor setting to something like words after you have used the rotor to adjust speaking rate or volume. If you don't think you are likely to want to change the speed or volume of VoiceOver speech this way it is best to remove speaking rate and volume from your rotor in the Rotor Items settings mentioned above. This will both remove clutter from your rotor dial and also avoid unintentional changes to speaking rate or volume.

The rotor won't always remain in its current position when you move on to something new. The Rotor settings include a Change Rotor With Item switch which is normally left on. This will automatically change the rotor position to its most useful position when you change the context. For example if you open the Mail app and touch an item in your Inbox, the rotor will automatically be set to Actions so that your vertical swipes allow you to delete messages and take other actions on messages.

 The rotor has many uses, including how helpful it can be when browsing the web, editing text and starting handwriting.

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