Haaaalp! iPhone in weird unusable mode!

Factual Questions
1

My iPhone is suddenly in a weird mode where I can’t really use it. To get into it I touch one of the buttons which brings up the lock screen, but swiping the thing at the bottom to open it instead draws a box around that thing. Holding down the top button to turn the phone off gives me a slider I’m supposed to swipe to confirm turning it off, but doing that just draws a box around the slider instead.

After some experimenting I discovered I can double tap anything with a box around it and get the effect of sliding it, but then other stuff is weird, and mostly I keep getting boxes around the different control elements in each screen. I can’t get it to do anything useful.

What is this and, more importantly, how do I fix it? Or has it died a weird death? It’s a 4S with the latest or next to latest OS. I don’t know what started this, it was a few hours ago.

Thanks!

2

Sounds like someone turned on VoiceOver in the Accessibility menu. Make sure everything is off in:

Settings > General > accessibility.

3

That was it. Don’t know how I turned it on, as the phone was in my hand or my pocket all day, and I’ve never even used the Accessibility menu. And I couldn’t navigate there, either, but tried holding down the Home button and saying “turn VoiceOver off”, and it worked.

Thanks! My life is in order again. Or, well, such as it was.