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Apple announces new accessibility features, including eye tracking

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Re: Apple announces new accessibility features, including eye tracking

#92
post #38

my first thought regarding eye-tracking: "whose accessibility to what|whom?"

Do you have another idea beyond the accessibility of Users without fine motor control to the phone's screen?

which ads you are looking at

Re: Apple announces new accessibility features, including eye tracking

#93
post #9

I love accessibility features because they might be the last features developed solely with the benefit of the user in mind. So many other app/os features are designed to steal your attention or gradually nerf usefulness.

I don't love that solid UX gets pushed under the accessibility rug, as an option you might never find.

I don't care how cynical it sounds, user experience became user exploitation a long time ago. Big Tech have been running that gimmick at too-big-to-fail scale for the last decade or so.

Re: Apple announces new accessibility features, including eye tracking

#94
post #17

Accessibility settings are really a gold mine on iOS for device customization (yes, I agree, they shouldn’t be limited to accessibility). I’m particularly interested in the motion cues and the color filters for CarPlay - I have color filters set up to enable every night as kind of a Turbo-night shift mode (deep orange-red color shift), would love to do the same for CarPlay. I also completely forgot iOS had a magnifie…

Accessibility features tend to be superpowers though, and I'm glad Apple gates them behind permissions and opt-ins. We all know of applications who try to trick the user into granting them inappropriate access to the device through the Accessibility APIs. I think DropBox still begs you to grant them Accessibility access so its tendrils can do who-knows-what to your system. With great power comes great responsibility.

It varies. Things like keyboard control or that kind of thing, absolutely, but mostly I've used it for stuff like "don't make an animated transition every time I change pages like an overcaffienated George Lucas" or "actually make night shift shift enough to be useful at night". I also use the background sounds to augment noise cancellation while taking a nap. All of those are just useful things or personal settings, not necessarily attack vectors.

Re: Apple announces new accessibility features, including eye tracking

#95
post #13

> Vehicle Motion Cues is a new experience for iPhone and iPad that can help reduce motion sickness for passengers in moving vehicles. This excites me so, so much! I can't really use my phone as a passenger in a car without getting motion sick after 1-2 minutes. This seems like it might be a promising thing to try.

Have you noticed any correlation between how hungry you are and how fast motion sickness kicks in?

I regularly drive two family members around—one gets motion sick much faster and more frequently when hungry, while the other gets motion sick the same either way.

Does make me wonder what the difference is there.

Re: Apple announces new accessibility features, including eye tracking

#96
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The image description stuff is already surprisingly good - I noticed when I got a photo text while driving and it described it well enough for me to know what it was.

Same, a family member send a photo while I was driving and over Carplay it was described fairly accurately.

It’s sometimes awesome, and often extremely basic. “Contact sent you a picture of a group of people at an airport”. Amazing. “Contact sent you a screenshot of a social media post”. Useless. We know iOS can select text in pictures, so Siri can clearly read it. It knows it’s SoMe, so why not give me the headline?

Re: Apple announces new accessibility features, including eye tracking

#98
post #37

Eye tracking is not an accessibility feature, it is an advertising optimization feature disguised as an accessibility feature.

You can say a lot of negative true things about Apple but this is just silly. There is no way Apple is going to expose that data to underlying apps in the same way they refused to do it in Vision Pro. I'd bet a good bit of money it works the same way where it's a layer on top of the app that the app can't access and from the video it looks like that's exactly how it works.

Re: Apple announces new accessibility features, including eye tracking

#99
post #7

I wonder if this announcement had anything to do with the bombshells OpenAI and Google dropped this week. Couldn’t this have been part of WWDC next month?

I think it's more of "clearing the decks" for stuff that didn't make the cut for WWDC. I assume WWDC is going to be all about AI and they couldn't find a good spot to put this announcement. "Clearing the decks" isn't a very kind way to refer to this accessibility tech since Apple has always been better than almost everyone else when it comes to accessibility. I don't see this as "we don't care, just announce it early" as much as "we can't fit this in so let's announce it early".

Re: Apple announces new accessibility features, including eye tracking

#100
post #30
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every attention thief is absolutely thrilled at the idea of tracking your eyes. Let’s all imagine the day where the YouTube free tier pauses ads when you’re not actively looking at them. Shit. I’m turning into one of those negative downers. I’m sorry. I’ve had too much internet today.

If this is at all like the eye tracking in Vision Pro, it is only available to the OS and apps are not given access to the data.

Until people complain that Apple is being anti-competitive by not making vision tracking open, or allowing third-party eye-tracking controls, etc. etc.
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