What do you do when your iPhone, iPad (Mini), or iPod Touch has issues with one of the hardware buttons? This article describes a few ways to continue to use your device even though it may have a broken Home Button or volume button by using Accessibility Features. There are ways to navigate your iOS device without using the Home Button.

Apple goes to great lengths to make their products accessible to those with disabilities. The iPhone, iPad (Mini), and iPod Touch running iOS 6 include dozens of features to help the hearing and sight impaired as well as a feature like Guided Access that helps a person stay focused on one app. There are additional benefits to these Accessibility Features. For example, Guided Access can be used as Kid’s Mode to make sure that a toddler is locked in to one app and can’t accidentally delete photos or send random text messages (for more on Kids Mode for iPad (Mini) and iPhone, click here: Turn on Kid’s Mode (Guided Access) on your iPhone, iPad (Mini) and iPod Touch in iOS 6).

Assistive Touch is another one of these Accessibility Features that can be used for multiple purposes. One of these uses is to compensate for a broken hardware button. Assistive Touch creates a special touch button that sits on top of the entire iOS system. No matter what app you are using, this special touch button is accessible. So, if your Home Button is broken and you need to activate Siri, all you do is tap this Assistive Touch button and you are given a virtual Home Button on your screen as well as a Siri Button. Tap the Siri button to launch Siri. Or, if your volume control buttons are broken for some reason, the Assistive Touch button has virtual volume control buttons as well. There are quite a few other Assistive Touch features as well including a virtual shake (initiates the shake to undo feature described here: Shake your iPhone/iPad to Undo), virtual screen lock, manual screen rotation, screenshot, virtual launch of Multitasking Tray, as well as others. You can virtually bypass all hardware buttons by using Assistive Touch mode.

So, how does one go about setting up Assistive Touch mode? It is quite easy. Here are the steps:

1. Open the Settings App and navigate to General –> Accessibility –> Assistive Touch.
2. Turn Assistive Touch On. Once it is on, you will see an opaque button that appears on the screen. You can tap and drag this button to anywhere that is convenient. If you want the ability to turn Assistive Touch on and off quickly and you still have functionality of your Home Button, you can set it to be activated with a Triple-Click of the Home Button (in the accessibility settings, scroll to the bottom and tap on Triple-click Home, tap Assistive Touch to add it to the Triple-click function).
3. Now you can bypass your Home Button by simply tapping on the opaque Assistive Touch button to bring up the functionality you need.