Brightness on iPad goes dark

I had a call from my mom while she was a passenger in a car for a long trip. She brought her iPad with her, loaded with movies to watch. For some reason, the brightness kept dropping, even when she manually moved it back up. She couldn’t figure out why and when she called me, I couldn’t figure it out either.

I asked her to send me a screenshot so I could see what was going on. This is what she sent:

brightness icon shows up on iPad screen

I searched some discussion forums and found some mentions of auto brightness but that didn’t fix it. Then someone mentioned a bluetooth keyboard whose keys were accidentally pressed. So I called her back and asked if her bluetooth keyboard was possibly in her bag and turned on. Yes! It was on and this keyboard has keys for controlling brightness. It seems that the ‘lower brightness’ button was being held down. As soon as she turned it off, all returned to normal.

I hope that someone finds this post when dealing with a similar annoying issue.

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