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Apple unveils new accessibility features

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Re: Apple unveils new accessibility features

#301

Post by Fr0styMatt88 »

jorvi wrote: post #290
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.…

Even at the time I remember it was widely cited that the SIM eject tool was a test for their new manufacturing process.

Re: Apple unveils new accessibility features

#302

Post by MBCook »

jorvi wrote: post #290
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.…

I liked the TouchBar. There were two problems with it:

1. It replaced the F keys. I suspect pros wouldn’t have complained so loudly if it didn’t. And it was too expensive for the cheaper computers where it may have been more popular.

2. They never changed it. Ok the first version wasn’t a big hit. Other than bringing back the escape key they never did anything. They sent it out to be a hit or to die and gave up there.

Re: Apple unveils new accessibility features

#303

Post by jedberg »

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…

One thing that helped me a lot to fix the iPhone keyboard was turning off slide to type. I learned that tip here on HN actually!

Open your Settings app. Tap on General. Scroll down and select Keyboard. Toggle off Slide to Type

Re: Apple unveils new accessibility features

#304

Post by Fr0styMatt88 »

dd8601fn wrote: post #234
phatskat wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They never made it flexible enough for people to customize it. I feel like it was fairly customizable - the Mac system settings let you do a lot of drag and drop of controls, and I recall iTerm having a similar interface for customizing the bar in its own settings. I do think it should’ve been given a lot more love, but that’s Apple for ya I guess

I think a bigger issue was that so few applications used it in cool, interesting ways. It has the same appeal as the oled button boxes some people have, except it’s right there on the deck… but nobody did anything with it. I sure did prefer the media controls on it, though. I still have a 16” here and am reminded of what could have been.

I actually think it would have done well if it was just like those button boxes / Stream Deck / etc. Like a row of transparent function keys with screens, but then that would have been a flexibility tradeoff.

Re: Apple unveils new accessibility features

#305

Post by wetpaws »

JeremyHerrman wrote: post #295
jorvi wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

You're underestimating Apple's meticulous planning, which has only become more intense in the Cook era. Bad feature/UX or not, each one of those decisions was calculated. Read this ars quote from 2010 [0]: >Apple used the small part—one that is not integral to the device’s functionality—to see if the company was capable or producing a custom design to Apple’s specifications. Typically, manufacturers prefer to have at…

[dead]

Re: Apple unveils new accessibility features

#306

Post by sysworld »

MBCook wrote: post #302
jorvi wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

I liked the TouchBar. There were two problems with it: 1. It replaced the F keys. I suspect pros wouldn’t have complained so loudly if it didn’t. And it was too expensive for the cheaper computers where it may have been more popular. 2. They never changed it. Ok the first version wasn’t a big hit. Other than bringing back the escape key they never did anything . They sent it out to be a hit or to die and gave up ther…

no2 is what annoyed me the most. I liked it for the most part, but it was never updated, even on the software side we had very few changes. It could've been great.

Re: Apple unveils new accessibility features

#307

Post by jonnyasmar »

Different angle from the developer side: Apple's a11y API at the OS level is genuinely good. It's the WebKit-embedded-in-native gap that breaks. Shipped a Tauri app where Monaco editor lived inside WKWebView and found out the hard way that VoiceOver's `accessibilitySupport: auto` mode silently breaks backward text selections in Monaco — only setting it to "off" gave us correct selections. Which meant choosing between functional text selection or VoiceOver support, and the answer was selection.

Rock-solid in AppKit/UIKit. Falls over at the embedded-WebView seam where most modern desktop apps actually live.

Re: Apple unveils new accessibility features

#308

Post by bdamm »

jorvi wrote: post #290
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.…

You're misunderstanding how difficult it is to make major architectural changes to products the way Apple can. One of the ways to do it is to hide the architectural change as something else, something niche, and only when it has survived the fire of deployment there try to scale it up to the full market. It's actually quite genious, and you can expect more of it now that Apple's hardware guru is the chief.

I can't help but wonder if this agentic-via-accessibility angle is the result of this new leadership. If it is, it's a very good sign for Apple, because software and especially the AI gap is Apple's achillies right now.

Re: Apple unveils new accessibility features

#309

Post by bonoboTP »

Aboutplants wrote: post #72
isityettime wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Me too, but often it's more out of FOMO and a feeling of there being so much other stuff to listen to. But in truth it's either way just a fraction you can listen to from immense amounts of valuable stuff. On more reflection, I find that listening on 1x to something allows more thinking from my end, questioning the truth of what the speaker says, thinking about tangents or similar things I've heard elsewhere, pondering stuff etc. Just like reading a book fast isn't the best strategy. Sometimes you want to look up and just think about what you just read, etc.

Re: Apple unveils new accessibility features

#310

Post by bonoboTP »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #115
simondotau wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same. Returning to 1x speed makes people sound (to my 2x-abused ears) drunk and slurring their works. If I want to listen to something slowly and carefully, I will just about tolerate 1.25x. What really frustrates me is watching/listening to discussion of music, because I am forced to listen to the talking at 1x because the music sounds wrong (and is wrong) at anything other than 1x.

The funny thing is that slow talkers sound normal at 2x speed. It's jarring when you hear their actual speech.

And then there is Dwarkesh who sounds like 2x on 1x.
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