[Trainer-Talk] iPhone with no home button

[Brian Vogel]

Brett Boyer wrote, in part: "I tried to explain it as if there was a button
at the bottom that you have to press and slide it up at the same time."

Interesting.  And that's an excellent way of putting it.  I was just
teaching the virtual home button on an iPad with VoiceOver yesterday, and I
came to say that the first tone that you hear is the virtual home button
capture tone and that when you know you've captured it, you continue moving
upward, briskly, until you hear the next tone in sequence that you want.

On this iPad the first tone after the capture tone, which was at a slightly
higher pitch, was the "go to your homepage" tone, and if you continued
sliding up without having paused or lifted your finger, and heard the next
higher pitched tone, that's the "open app switcher" tone.

This client tried, mightily, to get me to tell here that there was some way
to avoid learning the virtual home button (she has an iPhone SE, so she's
used to the hard home button it sports) and I told her, kindly but in no
uncertain terms, that using it is a fundamental skill.  The funny thing is
that she was doing well, very well, with controlling it after she
understood the capture tone and that you don't stop swiping or pause the
swipe until and unless you hear "the next tone up" or "the one after that"
depending on whether you want to go to your home screen or open the app
switcher.  I try to teach my students that it's not a bad thing not to
achieve mastery in mere seconds.  It's akin to riding a bike.  It takes
time to get the cadences (whether tapping, swiping, flicking, etc.) down
but once you have them, you can't un-have them just like once you can
balance a bicycle you can't ever get on one and have the kind of complete
instability you had before you finally "got the trick."

Brian