Navigating through TikTok feeds is usually quite intuitive and simple: you swipe up or down, stay watching the videos you are interested in and, when you finish watching them, swipe up to watch another recommended video. The app’s ease of use is one of the reasons why it is so widely used (and replicated) around the world. But what if you didn’t even need to use your hands?
Tiktoker @roxanna.roxi, a clothing and cosmetics influencer, reveals in a TikTok video a trick to navigate the app without touching or tapping anything. “A super cool TikTok trick you didn’t know existed – did you know you can scroll through TikTok without using your hands? Just say ‘next’,” the tiktoker says in her video, which has already accumulated almost 90,000 likes.
The key to all this lies in the iPhone’s accessibility features. With them, you can not only set your cell phone to alert you when the washing machine rings, but also allow you to control functions and apps by voice. To do this, you just need to go to Settings and then to Accessibility, where you will find the function “Configure voice control”.
Once inside this feature, we can create a voice command for an action on your iPhone. For the feed to slide up, Roxanna chose to say “next”, but you can set any word or phrase. Once the command is created, we’ll need to configure the gesture it will be equivalent to; in this case, we would need to slide our finger upwards, as we would normally do on a TikTok feed. We save our configuration and we are all set.
The accessibility features of the iPhone have a multitude of options that were originally designed to make it easier for people with disabilities to navigate and use the phone. However, given their versatility, anyone can make use of the features if they see the need.
And if you get bored with the videos you see in TikTok’s For You feed, don’t worry, in the future, a new feed called STEM will be released that will show you popular science content and, in addition, you will soon be able to reset the video recommendation algorithm at the click of a button.
