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Apple unveils new accessibility features

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Re: Apple unveils new accessibility features

#281

Post by s0rce »

bayindirh wrote: post #279
s0rce wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure? Liquid metal was the name of a bulk metallic glass. There were usb flash drives using it as a case https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquidmetal . Wikipedia lists apple licensing this technology. Metal injection molding is also a thing but I haven't heard it called liquid metal. Usually its MIM.

Honestly, I didn't know that "amorphous metal alloy" is also called metallic glass. I computed it to something else entirely. So you're right on that front. MIM is something else, that's right, but properties of Liquid Glass allows it to be injection molded AFAIK. MIM process is completely different from casting Liquid Metal. MIM generally starts as a powder and heated and molded, Liquid Metal can be just "melted and…

glass is the general materials science term for an amorphous non-crystalline solid

Re: Apple unveils new accessibility features

#282

Post by bayindirh »

s0rce wrote: post #281
bayindirh wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, I didn't know that "amorphous metal alloy" is also called metallic glass. I computed it to something else entirely. So you're right on that front. MIM is something else, that's right, but properties of Liquid Glass allows it to be injection molded AFAIK. MIM process is completely different from casting Liquid Metal. MIM generally starts as a powder and heated and molded, Liquid Metal can be just "melted and…

glass is the general materials science term for an amorphous non-crystalline solid

TIL.

I did my Ph.D. by developing BEM evaluators for working on metals, but glasses (as in class of materials) were not in my domain, so I'm thick as a brick on that part of the materials science.

Edit: BEM methods is as fun as USB buses and PSU units.

Re: Apple unveils new accessibility features

#283

Post by bitwize »

Barbing wrote: post #146
bitwize wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How did you come across those tracks? Never have myself.

My in-laws once misconfigured their television and it came blaring through.

Re: Apple unveils new accessibility features

#285

Post by kakugawa »

c0wb0yc0d3r wrote: post #19
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.

I think we should reserve judgment until this lands in the hands of the people it helps. My experience is limited to my elderly parents who have trouble seeing. With the text size Apple allows them to set it to, their phones are unreadable. Text runs off the screen in every app, 1st and 3rd party. In their bill example, the user is told to confirm with the provider. Why not offer to call the number on the bill? Inste…

It's prob why they chose a11y features. They have more pain, so they're willing to tolerate more growing pains. (And prob more motivated to provide feedback.)

Re: Apple unveils new accessibility features

#286

Post by brokencode »

bigyabai wrote: post #221
brokencode wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think abysmal is the right word. The hardware was widely praised except for being dorky looking and a few other complaints. The price and lack of content and developer interest have been the main problems. And ultimately, people just don’t seem that interested in this product category. Meta ran into the same issue, though at least they targeted gaming where there is a decent niche. VR/AR tech seems cool and f…

Meta did sell over 20 million headsets. The Quest is definitely lower-margin hardware than Vision Pro, but in terms of install base that's an order of magnitude larger audience. Apple really screwed themselves by only supporting WebXR for cross-platform VR experiences. Soon Valve will ship the Steam Frame , which will likely cost a fraction of the Vision Pro and support bog-standard PC games like H3VR, flight simulat…

Yeah, the gaming market is a decent sized market. It’s not huge, though, and is not growing very fast.

It was a strategic mistake for Apple to not focus on gaming. But realistically, the AVP was always going to be way too expensive for basically anything.

Maybe if you could pick one up for like $800 and there was a lot of great 3D immersive content, it could take off. But even then, I feel like it’s just not a product category the average person is that excited about.

Re: Apple unveils new accessibility features

#287

Post by leokennis »

postalcoder wrote: post #64

One 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…

All day every day my iPhone makes me feel like an idiot. I need to correct every other word I type (or at least what my iPhone thinks I typed). While correcting, autocorrect introduces new and even more baffling misspellings.

Sometimes it gets to “fever dream where you’re suddenly unable to successfully perform everyday tasks” levels of insanity.

And the worst part is: it used to be fine. I’d type more or less on full keyboard levels of speed and accuracy on my iPhone 4S.

Re: Apple unveils new accessibility features

#288

Post by OrvalWintermute »

postalcoder wrote: post #64

One 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…

I want to echo the comments that you just made.

One of my primary methods of interacting with an iPhone is through speech and the state of Apple speech transcription is pretty horrible. It bothers me greatly.

I know some of the workarounds and things but it does feel like it’s in the Stone ages.

I don’t think it’s a microphone issue since iPhone microphones are fairly decent and I don’t think it’s a CPU issue either because Apple Silicon seems to be some of the best on the market. Which leaves us with the software…

Maybe they should put that cash hoard to good use and buy up some of these transcription companies or license their IP so we get truly high-quality transcription.

Re: Apple unveils new accessibility features

#289

Post by mistersquid »

jkman wrote: post #102
mistersquid wrote: post #46

> A new power wheelchair control feature leverages the precision eye-tracking system on Apple Vision Pro to offer a responsive input method for compatible alternative drive systems. [0] The above caption for Apple Vision Pro is for a video that to me, as an Apple Vision Pro user, is discomforting. More questions are raised than are answered by the short video: Is the user able to fit the Apple Vision Pro by him/herse…

Your concerns are completely nonsensical. It's clearly being marketed as a healthcare tool for people with debilitating injuries that preclude the use of hand-powered wheelchair controls, severe situations where there's no neck-down control and users would be limited to controls like head-tilt or mouth actuated systems. These people obviously require daily care to simply get them out of bed and into the chair and bac…

> Your concerns are completely nonsensical.

With all due respect, my concerns are not nonsensical but borne of my daily use with Apple Vision Pro and my awareness of the limitations of dwell control.

Iterating on this idea with a device lighter than Apple Vision Pro and improvements to dwell control would likely be required before this could ship to larger populations of disabled users, but that is not what is depicted in the video.

My sense is that the possibility of an accessibility affordance with people who are severely disabled is driving opinions in this case more than the reality of what’s available.

To my mind, much of these AX announcements are reminiscent of the circumstance that led John Gruber to author “Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino”, which is that these are not shipping features but ones slated for “some time later this year”.

I’m a huge AX fan and work directly in the domain space, but something about that video in particular coupled with my near-daily use of Apple Vision Pro doesn’t feel right.

Re: Apple unveils new accessibility features

#290

Post by jorvi »

JeremyHerrman wrote: post #168

Apple loves to stealth test new tech in full public view by sneaking it into relatively mundane places, so debuting agentic AI via accessibility is very on brand. A few other examples: - The Touch Bar was much more than an OLED strip, it was Apple’s first move in the transition to Apple Silicon on macs. The Apple T1 chip in the 2016 Touch Bar MacBooks was the first solely Apple-designed processor to appear in a Mac a…

You're reading way too much into it. These are just failed attempts at commercializing something.

- People hated the touchbar. Only years after it became liked, and only under tech enthusiasts that hacked and tweaked it to have much deeper functionality.

- Making the ejector out of an expensive alloy made no sense.

- Realitykit (and the Vision, which is also crashing and burning) is a solution looking for a problem.

- 3D touch had both discoverability and usability problems.

- etc etc.

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