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On some days I’m way too tired to be looking at a screen. So I want to play some podcasts on my iPhone, so I end up looking at another bright screen. Is there a way to fully use the iPhone with the screen off.

Actually, there is. I use the iPhone’s accessibility mode called “VoiceOver”, which is made for blind or visually impaired users. At first, it’s strange to use, since a single tap doesn’t actually press buttons on screen; rather, it selects an element and speaks its description, and then you use double-tap to press on it. Since moving the finger on screen only continuously selects elements, you have to use triple-finger swipe to swipe the screen.

Sliding the finger left and right as a gesture will select the “next” and “previous” elements, while single finger up and down is a customized action, normally playing the next or previous word, but could be anything else. Double-finger swipe down start playing back the current element, useful to play back an entire web page.

I could keep on going, but the point is that you have to read the VoiceOver section of the iPhone manual and practice a bit, otherwise you’ll get completely lost. For me, I remembered enough of it that it works quite well for me, even if it’s just to relax my eyes. Now, if only developers placed better button labels, especially when I use French as the text to speech language…