---
name: Screen curtain
slug: screen-curtain
category: accessibility
status: published
created: 2026-08-21T00:00:00.000Z
modified: 2026-08-21T00:00:00.000Z
definition: A screen reader mode that switches the display off entirely while
  navigation keeps working, used for privacy and by sighted testers checking an
  audio-only run.
aliases:
  - name: VoiceOver screen curtain
    source: hig
  - name: blackout mode
    source: community
  - name: screen off navigation
    source: community
tags:
  - assistive-tech
relations:
  contrastWith: []
  variantOf: []
  partOf: []
  seeAlso:
    - screen-reader
    - explore-by-touch
implementations: []
sources:
  - title: "Apple Support: Use Screen Curtain with VoiceOver"
    url: https://support.apple.com/en-us/111797
demo: inline
exhibit: false
useWhen: testing whether a flow works with the screen dark
---

Turn the screen curtain on and the display goes black. Not dimmed, not locked: black, as if the
backlight had failed, while everything else carries on exactly as before. Focus still moves, gestures
still land, speech still describes what focus reached. VoiceOver on iOS has had it for years, under
a three-finger triple tap, and it is one of the few accessibility features that is entirely about
the eyes of other people rather than the eyes of the person using it. That gesture belongs to
VoiceOver rather than to whatever is on screen: the system consumes the three-finger triple tap
before it reaches any app or web page, so no site can fire the curtain, block it, or even know that
it is on.

It exists for two reasons and they have nothing in common. The first is privacy, and it is the
original one. A blind reader on a bus, in a waiting room, or at a cash machine has a screen that
faces the world and says nothing to them. Turning it off means a passenger cannot read the message
being replied to or watch a PIN being typed. The second is battery, a real if smaller benefit on an
OLED phone read entirely by ear.

The third use is ours. A sighted developer with the curtain on cannot cheat. Every accessibility
test done by eye is contaminated by the eye: you know the button is there, so you find it, and you
never notice that its name is "button", that the [screen reader](/screen-reader) never announced the
error, or that two of the six controls are unreachable. With the display dark and
[VoiceOver](/voiceover) speaking, a flow either works or it stops, and the place it stops is the bug.
Half an hour of this teaches more than a week of automated checks, which cannot tell you that a
label was in the wrong place, only that it existed.

The design lesson is what the curtain proves about the interface, not about the feature. A product
that survives it is one whose structure carries the meaning: names that say what a control does,
order that follows the task, state announced when it changes, errors spoken where they happen.
A product that fails it usually fails on something invisible to a visual audit, like a spinner
nobody is told about or a step that only makes sense next to a picture. There is nothing to build
here, which is the point. The curtain is a tool for checking whether everything else was built.