A while ago I signed up as a sighted person on Be My Eyes. I didn't get as many calls as I had hoped, but I was glad to help out on the few that I could. One call was to read envelopes of incoming mail, another was to read pill bottles, and then there was the two funny guys on big cozy chairs with shopping bags of cereal boxes and wanted to know what was what. I remember one guy really didn't like one type. The app had a unique feature for the sighted person to turn on the camera of the vision impaired person.
Apple unveils new accessibility features
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Re: Apple unveils new accessibility features
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://youtu.be/wKISPePFrIs?si=ahGfFp0U7-pTU9w6&t=43 my go to example of this is this talk by Saqib Shaikh (a blind software engineer at Microsoft) giving a talk about Visual Studio. Link is timestamped
I think it takes quite a lot of practice to reach this speed. It's not rare among blind developers, but I think it still takes a lot of work to get there. Pretty impressive! I wish more people would watch videos like this just because having a realistic idea of how blind people do certain tasks can help you move from pity or even compassion to a more productive kind of understanding. I think sometimes when you haven'…
I listen to a lot of podcasts and listen at 1.5-2.0 speed and it’s to the point that I literally cannot stand listening to 1.0 speed anymore as they go too slowly (depending on the content of course).
Re: Apple unveils new accessibility features
#73Putting aside the fact that no company should have direct access to anyone's brain, how cool would it be to be building toward VISOR (from TNG) instead of this. If we could translate sensor signals to the neural circuitry of the brain directly, we wouldn't even need an LLM in the mix. But to have it as an overlay, as supplementary data! With the ability to turn it off of course. (Would a person even be able to turn it off? In the same sense as whether someone can "turn off" social media?) If only we had meaningful human rights and institutions that really protected them... I still can't fully give up the techno-optimism that made me love tech in the first place (and TNG for that matter).
Re: Apple unveils new accessibility features
#74I'm not blind but I sometimes I can't process where things are, even if in front of me. Would be cool to just point to a messy table and see where the keys are. If they offer this as some Vision/Core ML feature, I'd implement the messy table app as soon as these features land. Probably already possible, but simpler if they release this.
Re: Apple unveils new accessibility features
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
No they are saying that the audio playing for tts would be at like 2.4x what's in the commercial.
I don't get it. The speed of TTS can be adjusted, right? Pretty sure there's enough blind people who don't listen to voice at insane speeds, because they listen in their non-native second language or for whatever other reason. What's wrong in using lowest common denominator that's 100% accessible to those people as well as people who want faster speeds? Unlike "too fast", "too slow" doesn't get entirely inaccessible,…
No. It's not criticism. What they're saying is that the video was shot with a default that a sighted person could understand, because any blind person would naturally have their speed set to much higher than that.
It's like how in videos that teach people a foreign language, everyone speaks slowly and uses simple words, even though native speakers don't talk like that at all. The GP is simply saying that an actual blind person would be way more efficient at it, but they made the video with inefficient settings so sighted people could understand what was going on.
Re: Apple unveils new accessibility features
#76"Vehicle Motion Cues come to visionOS, which can help reduce motion sickness for people who use Apple Vision Pro as a passenger in a moving vehicle. Vision Pro will also support face gestures for performing taps and system actions, plus a new way to select elements with one’s eyes while using Dwell Control." Maybe just don't wear them in a car?
Wearing a headset in the back of an Uber doesn't sound that crazy, I use those motion cues on my iPhone even though I don't struggle with motion sickness https://www.youtube.com/shorts/OxbjggMcKrk
I use them as well. I'm usually the driver so I don't typically look at my phone while the car is moving, but I recently rode along with a family member to an event. They handed me their iPhone to look at something and I felt totally disoriented trying to look at a moving screen in a moving car. I had to resist the urge to turn on the motion cues.
Re: Apple unveils new accessibility features
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, the audio speed can be adjusted. Whether that control you see visually is actually accessible to a blind user is a different matter entirely. Further, it maxes out at 2x, but a blind person would typically screen read at the equivalent of 3-6x.
Huh, 2x is low even sometimes for sighted people. Related, it seems like YouTube recently paywalled speed increase beyond 2x. Another way in which it's not cheap to lose sight, I guess.
> Another way in which it's not cheap to lose sight, I guess.
True.
We can frame it even more strongly: "default societal practices actively discriminate against people with disabilities; they intentionally, consciously choose to make life harder for people who're disadvantaged".
Re: Apple unveils new accessibility features
#78One thing Apple really needs to get right is speech to text transcription. They've nailed accessibility in so many ways and yet it feels like they're a decade behind on properly transcribing voices. At least half a decade. Input on the iPhone is so dreadful nowadays. Their palm rejection is definitely worse than before, so mistyping is more frequent. Their text-correction algorithm for typing is worse than before, an…
Wispr Flow is a masterclass in STT. Apple's solution feels like it's from the last century in comparison. Same applies with Apple's TTS when you have ElevenLabs and OpenAI running laps around it. All I need is for my iPhone to do those things natively at the same quality level (because in Apple's walled garden that's the only way to get them usable everywhere).
Re: Apple unveils new accessibility features
#79> The total amount due on the bill is $83.89. Please verify this amount with your utility provider or by using Text Detection before making a payment. 1. Use AI to determine how much a bill is for 2. Call up the people who billed you and ask them how much they billed you 3. Pay billed amount
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Re: Apple unveils new accessibility features
#80And this is why androidlets will never win. They’re too busy selling your data to ever think of disabled people or usability.
iOS is just painfully good. I can pause a video, put my finger on text inside the video, and copy it. Until they added it, I didn’t even know how much I needed that.