Live data from Hacker News

Apple announces new accessibility features, including eye tracking

apple.com

221–230 of 300 posts

Re: Apple announces new accessibility features, including eye tracking

#221

Imagine an eye-tracking loupe function on mobile: fit the same amount of text but bubble up the part under foveolar gaze. Save on readers* everywhere. * readers are those glasses you can pick up at the drug store for $17.99.

It took me a couple read-throughs to understand what you meant, but yes, on-screen gaze-sensitive magnification would be amazing, I agree.

Re: Apple announces new accessibility features, including eye tracking

#222
post #164

I have better than 20/20 vision (yes, really) and now mobility problems, but there are some macOS accessibility features that I love. One is Zoom: I hold down two modifier keys and scroll, and can instantly zoom in to any part of the screen. It is extremely smooth, the more you scroll the higher you zoom, instantly and with high frame rate. Great when you want to show someone something, or just zoom into a detail of…

The default way to drag on a trackpad is something I’ve never gotten good with so I always enable drag lock the second I get a new laptop. Ideally I would switch to the three finger gesture but after 15 years of drag lock I just can’t get my brain to switch over.

Re: Apple announces new accessibility features, including eye tracking

#223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Guaranteed that marketers are salivating at the idea of eye tracking on apps and website. It's an amazing feature that absolutely needs to be gatekept.

I wonder if it'll use the same architecture as visionOS; where the vision tracking events and UI affordances are processed and composited out-of-process; with the app never seeing them.

Re: Apple announces new accessibility features, including eye tracking

#224
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…

FYI you can also make turbo night shift by scheduling toggling of white point balance, yep, in accessibility settings

Re: Apple announces new accessibility features, including eye tracking

#225
post #132

I wonder if Vision Pro has enough microphones to do the acoustic camera thing? If so you could plausibly get "speech bubbles over peoples heads", accurately identifying who said what. I imagine that could be pretty awesome for deaf people.

Deaf people I know certainly wouldn't want to be wearing a headset, say, in a restaurant. But a phone app or tablet that can do live text-to-speach would be good enough in many cases if it can separate voices into streams. Anything like this available?

Re: Apple announces new accessibility features, including eye tracking

#226
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> It knows it’s SoMe, so why not give me the headline? There's certainly a non-zero number of times this could go horribly wrong (I'm guessing CarPlay doesn't have any sense of who is in the car with you) and defaulting to not reading them out is the safest option (but they could definitely add a toggle for this, yeah.)

The same is true with reading out text messages. I’ve disabled it for CarPlay now after receiving a mildly raunchy text with a car full of colleagues. It’s still useful on the headphones though.

Re: Apple announces new accessibility features, including eye tracking

#227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I often use them to get around bad UI/UX (like using Reduce Motion), or to make devices more useful (Color Filters (red) for using at night). Even outside of this, even able-bodied folks can be disabled due to illness, surgery, injury, etc. So it's great to see Apple continuing to support accessibility.

The red color filter for outside when trying to preserve night vision is a great tip. Some apps have this built-in but much better to have the OS change it everywhere. Recommend creating a Shortcut to toggle this setting.

I think you can just add it to Control Centre, no need for shortcuts. I made an app for reading in the dark, minimising the amount of light hitting your eyeballs, but I'm still using the red color filter every night.

The app is overall darker and more "strict" with how it handles content (esp. images) though: https://untested.sonnet.io/Heart+of+Dorkness and midnight.sonnet.io

Overall, reduced the number of photons is a fun metric to play with when building something/messing with prototypes.

Re: Apple announces new accessibility features, including eye tracking

#228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure why, but I feel like I only get motion sickness in the back of Priuses. It must be something about their braking curve. I don't sit in enough EVs to tell if they're the same.

Some people never really learn how to use one-pedal driving, so they end up just going back and forth between accelerating and decelerating. That'll make me motion sick in a hurry, and I bet that is fairly universal (among people prone to motion sickness in cars, that is). So in that sense, any EV or hybrid is potentially a problem, depending on the driver.

Ah yes, I never get motion sick, except for when I'm in the car with just such a driver: A person with sine-foot.
Post reply on HN