How to Turn Kindle Fire Accessibility On & Off

The Kindle Fire has some excellent accessibility features, but if you test them out you may find yourself having trouble turning them back off again.

Let me help you with using these features as they can be a fabulous benefit, or a little Kindle Fire problem if you can't turn the accessibility off once it's on!

Kindle Fire Accessibility Features

First, let's list go over the available accessibility features that come with your Kindle Fire. To find yours, slide down the quick settings menu, tap "More" or "Settings", and tap "Accessibility".

Depending on which tablet you have, you may have options for both vision settings and hearing settings as follows (pictures below):

Turning On & Using Kindle Fire Accessibility

To turn on an accessibility setting on your Kindle Fire just tap the "On" button- yep, it's that easy. ;)

Now I'll briefly go over these features so you have more of an understanding of how they work.

Voice Guide & Screen Reader

The Voice Guide and Screen Reader are basically the same thing in that it turns on a voice that will either read out loud what is currently on the screen or make a sound when you tap something, such as the back or home buttons.

However, you do have to have the sound on and up loud enough to actually hear this option- yes, it's a picky necessity but it does make sense if you think about it. ;)

The main difference between the two Kindle Fire accessibility features is that one is on the Kindle Fire HD (2012) and the other is the HD & HDX (2013 releases).

The voice even lets you know when you connect or disconnect your USB cable to another device (ex: PC) or to the charger. Cool!

Explore by Touch

This Kindle Fire accessibility feature is great for those with visual impairment who need additional voice help to describe items being touched and new screens that are visited. It also comes with additional navigation gestures.

Let me repeat that last part as it's important: this feature comes with "additional navigation gestures".

These gestures make sense but if you don't know what they are or how to use them and this feature is turned on (accidentally or on purpose) then you're going to have trouble turning it back off.

Let me show you how it works with this hand gestures:

Explore/select items:
One finger single tap

Activate an item:
One finger double tap

Scroll/move an item:
Two fingers swipe left, right, up, or down

Scroll entire page/list:
One finger swipe right then left (next); left then right (previous)

I'll go over how to turn this feature off in a moment, but first let's go over the other accessibility settings.

Orientation Lock

This feature is exactly the same as the auto-rotate lock/unlock option located in the quick menu settings that you slide down from the top of your screen. This makes the orientation lock, in my opinion, redundant and unnecessary which is probably why it was removed from the 2013 tablets.

Screen Magnifier

The Screen Magnifier lets you use gestures and specific taps to enlarge (zoom) and pan your screen. This is really helpful if you're trying to view something that's really small, or if your eyes are getting a little old and worn out. (No worries, everyone eventually gets to that point if they live long enough.)

When you turn on this feature the following window pops up with instructions on how to use this cool Kindle Fire accessibility: (I've typed up the text to the right, for those who can't see/read the image.)

Screen magnifier

When the Screen Magnifier is turned on, you can magnify your screen to read items easily.
-Magnify screen: Triple-tap the screen with a finger. If the screen doesn't magnify, try slowing down or speeding up your tapping speed.
-Pan: Drag two fingers across the screen. Hold your fingers slightly apart while panning.
-Change zoom level: Pinch inward or outward with two fingers when the screen is magnified.
-Temporarily magnify screen: Triple-tap the screen with a finger and hold your finger on the screen. Drag your finger around the screen to pan.

Here, let me clarify by showing you the hand symbols:

Magnify Screen:
One finger triple-tap

Pan:
Two finger drag

Zoom:
Two finger pinch in/out

Temporarily Magnify:
Triple-tap hold, drag, release

When you correctly tap three times at a speed your Kindle Fire will recognize, the screen will zoom in and be surrounded by an orange border.

If you're still on magnify, just do another triple-tap to exit the magnifier. You'll still need to turn this feature off in the accessibility settings if you no longer want to use it.

Use Large Font Size

This feature will slightly increase the font size in the settings and a few other areas where you find text, like the names of your apps and music.

Here's a visual of the minor amount of font increase when this is turned on for my Kindle Fire HDX 8.9".

Before:

After:

Like I said it's pretty subtle, huh? Personally, I think it should have been even larger, but since I don't work for Amazon I don't think I have much say in the matter. If you agree with me, feel free to contact Amazon and give them your suggestions. ;)

Closed Captioning

This Kindle Fire accessibility feature turns on closed captions of movies and TV from Amazon Instant Video and any other videos that have closed captioning available when played on the web (Silk Browser).

If you turn closed captioning on or off while watching a video it will also turn it on or off in the accessibility settings. Here's a picture of where that is while watching the movie, Penelope (no image of the actual video is shown in this example since you can't take a screen capture of videos on your Kindle Fire):

Convert Stereo to Mono

This Kindle Fire accessibility feature will disable stereo sound and instead plays all audio sounds through a single channel.

What this means is that instead of a sound coming through the left speaker/headphone while another comes through the right speaker/headphone both sounds will come through both speakers/headphones.

Have you noticed when watching a movie in the theater that when you see something, like glass breaking on the left side of the movie screen the sound comes from the left side of the theater, while other sounds come from the right. That's stereo sound which simulates the way our ears process sounds.

Mono sounds are a combination of all the sounds from all locations vs splitting the sounds.

if you're hard of hearing or have limited/no hearing in one of your ears, this accessibility setting would be very beneficial to use, especially if you're listening with head phones. This way you'll more easily pick up all the sounds since they aren't being split between speakers/headphones.

Make sense? Alright, now on to the main event!

Turning Off Kindle Fire Accessibility

Obviously turning these features on is fairly easy while turning them back off is just as easy... unless you turn on the Explore by Touch feature, then you might have a little trouble (I did) even if you know what you're doing.

Part of the issue is that when you turn on the Screen Reader (HDX tablets) the Explore by Touch feature is automatically turned on too and although it shows you a tutorial on how to use this feature, it's not as easy to use as it seems.

As explained earlier in this article, the way to scroll or move an item when the Explore by Touch setting is on is to use TWO fingers when swiping.

So, if your Kindle Fire is in sleep mode and you awake it and want to unlock your screen you will need to use TWO fingers to swipe the lock open as shown in this image:

If you have enabled a password you will need to tap it in and then tap OK as usual.

Next, we'll need to go to the settings. This is also done by swiping with TWO fingers instead of one. As usual you will swipe downwards from the top of your screen to reveal the quick menu:

Once you've successfully pulled down the quick menu settings, tap the "More" or "Settings" button:

This will select it by putting a yellow box around it. Now double tap anywhere on the screen to activate it (I usually just tap the same item but you don't have to):

Now find and tap once on "Accessibility" (if you can't see it in the list you'll need to use two fingers and swipe up to scroll the list upwards):

Now double tap anywhere on the screen to activate the selection:

Tap the "Off" button under Screen Reader (which will automatically turn off Explore by Touch) or just turn off Explore by Touch if you still want the Screen Reader on:

Double tap anywhere to activate the selection:

The Screen Reader and Explore by Touch will finally be turned off and you can go about using your tablet as normal. Whew! :) That was quite a lot of steps to turn off the Kindle Fire accessibility wasn't it?

Tip to Access Settings When Accessibility is On

Alright, for those of you who may experience extreme difficulty in accessing the quick menu bar (and thus the settings) while the Explore by Touch feature is on, here's my little tip that might help.

Instead of just trying to swipe down with two fingers, try placing your two fingers just under the black notification bar and slightly swipe upwards and then downwards:

Remember to move in a continuous motion (don't stop) and when you see the quick settings bar appear you know you've finally gotten it:

It can still be tricky to do, especially on a Kindle Fire HD (2012 2nd generation) that's in portrait view, but keep at it and EVENTUALLY you'll get it. The first time took me SEVERAL minutes to do that I almost despaired that I would ever succeed, however the little tip above eventually saved my bacon. ;)

Love My Fire Video: How to Turn off Accessibility

To help show you both how easy and difficult this can be, here's a little video I put together.

In this video I show you two attempts, the first one when I got it right away (what luck!) and the second is when I had to keep working at it until I got it. (Can you see the frustration in my fingers?)

With a little practice you'll get the hang of it! Maybe I'm missing something, so if you know of an easier way to get this to work please let me know in the comments below.

For additional information on these Kindle Fire accessibility features see Amazon's help pages:

• Kindle Fire HD (2012 2nd Gen) Accessibility
• Kindle Fire HD (2013 3rd Gen) Accessibility Basics
  
• Kindle Fire HDX Accessibility Basics
  

Now you're ready to learn some more Kindle Fire tips or check out other common tablet problems you might be experiencing.

I ♥ My Fire!
- Christine