IOS 26 Lets You Control Your IPhone by Raising Your Eyebrows or Sticking Out Your Tongue
Apple’s iPhone offers a wide range of accessibility features that help users with different needs access their smartphones. There are features that let you control the device with your voice, your gaze, and it can even generate a special voice that sounds just like you to speak for you. In iOS 26, Apple is adding another way to control your iPhone or iPad — with head-tracking gestures.
Until now, Switch Control, which lets you move and select objects on the screen with a simple head movement, was the only head-tracking feature on the iPhone. It’s useful, but it can be tedious if you just want to assign a specific gesture to a specific action. Now, you can program specific functions and keyboard shortcuts at the OS level to specific head movements. For example, you can go to the Home screen by raising your eyebrows.
How to Set Up Head Tracking Gestures in iOS 26
First, make sure your iPhone is running the latest version of iOS 26. At the time of writing, it’s available as a public beta , but the stable version is expected to be released in September, a couple of weeks from now.
Go to Settings > Accessibility > Head Tracking and turn on Head Tracking .
Before we start using this feature, it’s important to talk about Dwell Control . This feature allows you to hold the cursor at one point for a certain amount of time to select the action it’s hovering over. Basically, if you’re controlling the cursor with your head and constantly looking at a certain point on the screen, it will be selected automatically. This can lead to accidental clicks, so if you want to use head tracking, it’s best to turn off Dwell Control first.
Next, go to the Actions section. Here, you can choose from a variety of gestures, such as Raise Eyebrows, Open Mouth, Smile, Stick Out Tongue, Blink, Wrinkle Nose, Purse Lips Right, and Purse Lips Left. Select an action and associate it with the action you want on your phone. You can associate it with a simple press, open the camera, or even assign it to launch an app like Home or Siri. You can also associate it with any accessibility feature, swipe action, or shortcut.
In the Sensitivity menu, you can change the sensitivity to facial expressions to “Weak” or “Exaggerated” . Depending on your settings, this can help prevent accidental presses or make it easier for your phone to recognize your gestures.
By assigning multiple gestures to corresponding actions, you can mimic the actions of a finger. For example, you can assign “Pull Lips Right” to swipe down and “Pull Lips Left” to swipe up , then use them simultaneously. Similarly, you can assign “Lift Eyebrows” to “Home” to complete the effect.
Instead of using the delay control to select items, you can also use a gesture like Stick Out Tongue for the Single Tap action for faster input.
You can also easily turn head tracking on and off because it’s tied to AssistiveTouch. You can add the AssistiveTouch toggle to Control Center to access head tracking features with a single tap. Open Control Center, tap and hold an empty space, tap Add control , then search for and add the AssistiveTouch control. Now tapping it will toggle head tracking on or off.