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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

#261

This is why Apple is the best. They’ll make features like this because it’s the right thing to do, even if it won’t really make any difference to 99.99% of their customers. They really earn consumer loyalty.

I'm hoping they'll add this to macOS too. Eye tracking would be great for end-user UX research.

I'd also like to see what sort of weird stuff people come up with to use eye tracking. Games could use that in interesting ways.

Re: Apple announces new accessibility features, including eye tracking

#262
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.

Vaguely related anecdote. I used to get bad nausea from aggressive physic-y VR games. But I heard people claim it can be grinded through. So I did that, and they were right. I can do VR games without needed to vomit although it’s still uncomfortable. However… I am now much more sensitive to non VR motion sickness. :|

I have had good luck with just closing one eye. But that is very tiring to do for long periods.

Re: Apple announces new accessibility features, including eye tracking

#264
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The iPhone has a hidden accessibility setting where you can map and double and/or triple tap of the back of your phone to a handful of actions. I use this to trigger Reachability (the feature that brings the entire UI halfway down the screen so you can reach buttons at the top) because phone screens are so damn big that I can't reach the opposite top corner with my thumb even on my 13 mini without hand gymnastics. An…

>The iPhone has a hidden accessibility setting This isn’t “hidden”. It was even called out and demonstrated in the iOS 14 keynote.

Perhaps I could rephrase that it's hidden within Accessibility settings, not that it's an accessibility setting that is furthermore hidden.

Most people don't go into that menu to look around for things they might want to use cause features that almost everyone could benefit from are alongside settings for people with visual and hearing impairments.

Re: Apple announces new accessibility features, including eye tracking

#265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vaguely related anecdote. I used to get bad nausea from aggressive physic-y VR games. But I heard people claim it can be grinded through. So I did that, and they were right. I can do VR games without needed to vomit although it’s still uncomfortable. However… I am now much more sensitive to non VR motion sickness. :|

I played games my whole life and was shocked I had near instant VR motion sickness in sim racing. Can confirm it can be grinded through, recognize the feelings and stop immediately.

Very similar experience. My instinct would be to fight the sickness and push through, but in reality you need to stop immediately and try again in a few hours. Your tolerance tends to build exponentially!

Re: Apple announces new accessibility features, including eye tracking

#266
post #56

macOS has had a version of eye tracking for a while, it's really fun to try out. System preferences -> Accessibility -> Pointer Control Then turn on the "Head pointer" option.

Cool. I'm a bit unsettled that my camera's green dot didn't turn on for it though.

Re: Apple announces new accessibility features, including eye tracking

#267

I wonder what new voices will be added to VoiceOver? We blind people never, ever thought Eloquence, an old TTS engine from 20 years ago now, would ever come to iOS. And yet, here it is in iOS 17. I wouldn't be surprised to see DecTalk, or more Siri voices. More Braille features is amazing, and they even mentioned the Mac! VoiceOver for Mac is notoriously never given as much love as VoiceOver for iOS is, so most blind…

My friends that use synthetic voices prefer cleanliness of the older and familiar voices. One friend listens at about 900 WPM in skim mode and none of the more realistic voices work well at those rates.

Every once in a while I'll hear a blind person's phone audio while I'm out and about and it sounds like an unintelligible stream of noises, but they're interacting with it and using it and getting information from it. It's amazing, a whole other world of interaction from what I experience with my phone. I kind of want to learn how they're interacting with it.

Re: Apple announces new accessibility features, including eye tracking

#268
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?

I don't want to say it's certainly not available, but I doubt it. Maybe someone has done something trying to recognize different voices by differences in pitch/volume/...

The vision pro has six mics, which likely enables it to locate the sources of sound in space by the amount of time it takes a sound to reach each mic (i.e. acting as an "acoustic camera"). Tablets and phones aren't going to have that hardware unfortunately.

And yeah, obviously wearing a headset is a pretty big compromise that's not always (or maybe even often) going to be worth it. This was more of a though of "the hardware can probably do this cool thing for people already using it" than "people should use the hardware so it can do the cool thing".

Re: Apple announces new accessibility features, including eye tracking

#269
remember how google added js apis to detect active tabs. and rendering intersection. complex webapps could use less battery and have richer interaction.

everyone rejoiced. nobody implemented anything useful.

soon, advertisers, google included, was selling ads packages by "viewability". lol.

can't wait for safari to lead with "eyed" ads.

Re: Apple announces new accessibility features, including eye tracking

#270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Recommend creating a Shortcut to toggle this setting. Huh? It's not built-in? Android (or at least Moto) has it for years, auto enable on the schedule or the sunrise/sunset.

Kinda feels like you could’ve done more of a cursory glance to see what functionality was actually being talked about before going for the “Android already does this!!” comment.

Kinda feels like you could've be more like [0] than being an ass, while totally missing what I was surprised about the lack of automagik, not of the feature itself.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40371449

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