Many senior people have poor eye sight problems and often need a good magnifying glass to be able to see fine prints. But we do not always carry a magnifying glass with us. On the other hand, we almost always have a smartphone with us. There is a way to use the smartphone as a magnifying glass with a flash light so that we can see those fine prints clearly.

The procedure is described in the following.

My Android based Samsung Galaxy S5 smartphone has built-in magnifying glass function. But it is deactivated in default position and needs to be activated.

To activate the magnifying glass function on my Samsung Galaxy S5 smartphone, go to Settings, then Accessibility, then Vision, then Magnification and turn it on.

When you need to use the magnifying glass, turn on the camera app and tap the screen three times. Then you can use the smartphone as magnifying glass to see the magnified fine prints on the screen. To adjust the zoom level (i.e., the magnification factor), pinch two or more fingers together or spread them apart.

To turn off the magnifying glass, tap the screen three times again.

However, when this feature of magnifying glass is on, the response time of the smartphone could be slowed down for various Apps.

The equivalent procedure for iPhone is described in the following website:

https://learningenglish.voanews.com/a/magnifying-glass-phones/4024864.html

However, sometime the fine prints may be in a low light area making it difficult to read without sufficient light. Fortunately, the smartphone also has a Flash Light function to shine light on the fine prints in low light area.

In my Samsung Galaxy S5 smartphone, the Flash Light icon is hiding in a group of Widgets. I have to pull the Flash Light icon from the group of Widgets and move it to the home screen on my smartphone to make it easy to use. The procedure to pull it out of the group of Widgets is the following:

A. Long-pressing a blank, available space on your home screen (not on an icon or the app launcher.) Just hold your finger down on the screen.

B. The home screen shrinks in size and moves up. The icons of Widgets and other items show up near the bottom of the home screen.

C. Tap the Widgets icon, then the whole group of many Widgets show up on the screen, may be on several screens.

D. Find the Flash Light Widget in the group of many Widgets. Tap and hold down the Flash Light Widget and place it on available slot on the home screen

Then when you need to use the Flash Light, just tap on the Flash Light icon on the home screen.

To turn off the Flash Light, just tap on the Flash Light icon again.

The procedure described above for magnifying glass with a flash light needs to be done only once, then the smartphone is ready for action.

When you need more light, just tap the Flash Light icon to turn it on. When you need magnifying glass, just tap on the camera icon, then tap the screen three times and the smartphone becomes a magnifying glass.