iOS 26 Lets You Control Your iPhone by Raising Your Eyebrows or Sticking Out Your Tongue

Apple's iPhone offers a large array of accessibility features that help all users, of varying needs, access their smartphones. There are features that let you control the device with your voice, your eyes, and it can even generate a special voice that sounds just like you, so it can talk for you. In iOS 26, Apple is adding one extra method for controlling your iPhone or iPad, and that is by using head tracking gestures.

Until now, the Switch Control feature, which lets you move and select things on your screen simply by moving your head, has been the only head tracking on the iPhone. It's useful, but can be tedious if you just want to map a specific gesture to a specific action. Now, you can program specific OS level functions and shortcuts to specific head movements. For example, you can raise your eyebrows to go to the Home Screen.

How to set up Head Tracking gestures in iOS 26

First, make sure that you're running the latest version of iOS 26 on your iPhone. At time of writing, it's available as a Public beta, but the stable rollout is expected in September, in a couple of weeks.

Go to Settings > Accessibility > Head Tracking and enable the Head Tracking feature.

Credit: Khamosh Pathak

Before you start using this feature, it's important to talk about Dwell Control. This is the feature where holding the cursor in one spot for a specific amount of time will select the action it's hovering over. Essentially, if you're controlling your cursor with your head and you keep looking at a specific point on the screen, it will get selected automatically. This can lead to accidental clicks, so if you want to use head tracking gestures, it's best to disable Dwell Control first.

Next, go to the Actions section. Here, you'll be able to pick from many gestures, like Raise Eyebrows, Open Mouth, Smile, Stick Out Tongue, Eye Blink, Scrunch Nose, Pucker Lips Right, and Pucker Lips Left. Choose an action, and map it to what you want it to do on your phone. You can map it to a simple tap, have it open your Camera, or even assign it to start an app like Home or Siri. You can also map it to any Accessibility feature, scroll action, or shortcut you might have.

From the Sensitivity menu, you can change the facial expression sensitivity to Slight, or Exaggerated. Depending on your setting, this will help stop accidental inputs, or make it easier to get your phone to recognize a gesture.

By setting multiple gestures to corresponding actions, you'll be able to mimic what a finger might be able to do. For example, you can map Pucker Lips Right to Scroll Down and Pucker Lips Left to Scroll Up, then use them in tandem. Similarly, you can map Raise Eyebrows to Home to complete the effect.

Instead of using the dwell control to select things, you can also use a gesture like Stick Out Tongue for the Single Tap action, for speedier inputs.

Credit: Khamosh Pathak

You can also enable or disable head tracking gestures with ease, because it's linked to AssistiveTouch. You can add the AssistiveTouch toggle to Control Center for a one-touch access to head tracking gestures. Open Control Center, tap and hold in empty place, tap Add a Control, then search for and add the AssistiveTouch control. Now, tapping on it will enable or disable head tracking gestures.