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Apple unveils new accessibility features

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Re: Apple unveils new accessibility features

#51

Post by isityettime »

RobMurray wrote: post #41
mohsen1 wrote: post #6

Fun fact: This video was made accessible to sighted people because no blind person would ever listen to voice at that speed. Honestly if you ever observe a blind person using computers you'd impressed how they can listen to audio at unimaginable speeds.

I know plenty of blind people who have their voice speed unbearably slow and barely scratch the surface of what technology can do for them. I think an interface where you can tell your phone what to do in natural language will really help a lot of less technical people. I'm not getting my hopes up though given apple's history with Siri, which is truly awful.

Whenever my sister (blind) and I (visually impaired) visit my mom (blind) we secretly turn up the reading speed on her TV just a little because we can't stand how unbearably slow she keeps it, but if we turn it up quickly, she'll freak out.

After a few more years of Thanksgivings and Christmases and Mothers' Days, we'll finally train her up to a reasonable speed lmao.

Re: Apple unveils new accessibility features

#52

Post by micromacrofoot »

nechuchelo wrote: post #4

This looks like a genuinely useful application of LLMs. I wish more companies focused on how they can help humans instead of replacing us or squeezing us as hard as possible in the name of productivity.

"looks like" there are a lot of automated accessibility systems that fall woefully short in practical use

this sort of thing really needs input from someone that uses it before we can judge it

Re: Apple unveils new accessibility features

#53

Post by freedomben »

mohsen1 wrote: post #6

Fun fact: This video was made accessible to sighted people because no blind person would ever listen to voice at that speed. Honestly if you ever observe a blind person using computers you'd impressed how they can listen to audio at unimaginable speeds.

Indeed, and not just fast, but often heavily robotic (which many sighted people struggle to understand even at 1.5x). I remember reading about a blind person who learned how to do echo-location using sound, and it seemed like such a cool superpower, that one of these days I'm going to take the plunge and unplug my monitor and start learning how to really use the tools. I worked with a blind person a few years back who got almost double the battery life from his laptop as the rest of us by having the screen off all the time, so that alone would be a nice feature. I may never get to the epic level of echo-location, but if I get even half-way there it would be awesome. With a bonus of being able to actually QA a11y changes.

Re: Apple unveils new accessibility features

#54

Post by isityettime »

bitwize wrote: post #40
mohsen1 wrote: post #6

Fun fact: This video was made accessible to sighted people because no blind person would ever listen to voice at that speed. Honestly if you ever observe a blind person using computers you'd impressed how they can listen to audio at unimaginable speeds.

I've heard textual description tracks on television programs before. They come fast, but not screen-reader fast. To the untrained ear a blind person's screen reader sounds like when you somehow get the TI-99/4A's speech synthesizer to read from invalid memory.

The audio description tracks are a different genre than screenreadera perform. They're acting, by actors, carefully written and performed to fit into the gaps in the dialogue while preserving the mood and flow of the show. I think speeding them up or making them robotic would ruin them, while both of those traits are actually desirable for screenreaders.

Re: Apple unveils new accessibility features

#55

Post by testfrequency »

lwkl wrote: post #50
testfrequency wrote: post #35

I don’t want to discredit more advancements in accessibility, but this feels like accessibility porn. I have fond memories of an old coworker 10 years ago who is blind. He would use his phone no problem, texting, going about his day, he was even on Tinder (credit to Tinder for making their app so accessible long ago). He would commute on his own, walk to the train station, even transfer to another train during peak r…

I mean even if it is marketing for them they still did the work and developed these features. I had some vision issues recently and was glad there were options to make text more legible to me. Additionally I don't believe this is just marketing. This is adaption to a changing market. Apple's customer base is aging and having these kinds of features will allow them to keep using Apple products for a longer.

They have done the work, but I don’t see much work that’s beyond what’s been previously capable without Apple Intelligence. The marketing of Apple Intelligence is weak here, not the foundational abilities.

Re: Apple unveils new accessibility features

#57

Post by zersiax »

Honestly as a blind person and blind developer myself, most of these features get a shrug at best. For one, there's already a bunch of third-party apps that do most if not all of this (Seeing AI, Envision AI, BeMyEyes, Aira, etc.). So at best, this does what all those apps are doing but faster and on-device, which may or may not mean it is also more inaccurate, we'll have to see. In the meantime, Mac OS's screen reader, VoiceOver, has been left to essentially exist in maintenance mode for years, where users have had to build, arguably impressive, third-party solutions to add features to the thing that comparable screen readers on Windows have had for a really long time.

Through that lens, this all looks a bit performative to me, but again, maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised.

The one thing I'm mildly excited to see is the improvement to Voice Control, as guessing what the programmatic name of a button is or having to constantly use a numbers grid to target elements doesn't sound fun.

To respond to what I see in some of the comments:

- On speech rate: It does take quite a bit of practice to crank up the speech rate and there's a degree of retraining you need to do when you switch voices. A lot of more "human" sounding voices are harder to follow at super high speeds which is why a lot of people prefer more robotic but consistent speech and generally aren't convinced by AI-powered TTS yet; they often fall apart if you raise the speech rate past a certain point. - Re: actually waiting for the target audience's verdict: This is so important. I see more and more companies, individuals etc. talk about accessibility, build accessibility solutions and evangelize AI for accessibility without EVER talking to the people they claim to help. This will almost certainly mean mistakes will be made, up to and including doing more harm than good. If you want to do accessibility right, that includes AI products of any kind, hire people with lived experience or you'll get the equivalent of machine-translated text, hackerproof security in one click or an AI-powered coffee bar that orders thousands of rubber gloves. Coincidental note: I have time for new projects right now :P

Re: Apple unveils new accessibility features

#59

Post by isityettime »

seeeeebt wrote: post #56

Surely a blind person relies a lot on audio input?

Maybe on a smartphone, but usually not on a computer. Keyboards are pretty good.

The other thing is that if you're around others, voice input means you have no privacy. Even if you're not doing anything particularly private, it's a bit awkward and potentially embarrassing. If you use touch input in conjunction with a screen reader, you can be more like a "normal" user in that what you're doing is just between you and your phone.

Re: Apple unveils new accessibility features

#60

Post by chipotle_coyote »

RobMurray wrote: post #41
mohsen1 wrote: post #6

Fun fact: This video was made accessible to sighted people because no blind person would ever listen to voice at that speed. Honestly if you ever observe a blind person using computers you'd impressed how they can listen to audio at unimaginable speeds.

I know plenty of blind people who have their voice speed unbearably slow and barely scratch the surface of what technology can do for them. I think an interface where you can tell your phone what to do in natural language will really help a lot of less technical people. I'm not getting my hopes up though given apple's history with Siri, which is truly awful.

Apple's history with accessibility is, on the whole, pretty good. I strongly suspect that the "coming soon" part of this means "after we integrate Google Gemini models into the system," so I don't think you should use the current state of Siri as a yardstick. (I actually have decent luck with the current Siri, but I don't push it very much and have sort of adapted myself to its limitations; on the flip side, I have a lot of skepticism around LLMs, but they're really a quantum leap in natural language processing capability over what came before, and the use cases they're showing here seem to be right in the LLM wheelhouse -- with the asterisk of "you're still always going to have to check its work.")
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