Live data from Hacker News

Apple unveils new accessibility features

apple.com

311–320 of 400 posts

Re: Apple unveils new accessibility features

#311
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.

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

1x is too slow for me.

Whenever I'm watching lectures / talks / podcasts, I tend to watch/listen to them at 2x to 2.5x times speed.

I only need to lower it if someone flubs an important word in a definition, I'll replay that part at 1x speed.

If the person is talking particularly slowly (usually for international audiences) I put the speed up to 3x to 4x speed so it sounds like normal 2x to 2.5x speed.

---

My youtube muscle memory:

(standard video controls used by every video editor ever)

J = back 5s

K = play/pause

L = forwards 5s

(youtube specific controls)

Shift F = toggle fullscreen

Speed controls (this part is muscle memorised as fast as a password input):

1. Cmd/Ctrl Shift K: opens console

2. Up arrow: loads previous command, typically: document.querySelector('video').playbackRate = 2.5

3. Enter: runs command

You have to type in the command for the first time, after that to change the speed, change "2.5" to whatever number you want and console history will remember the change so you can go through the different values with up/down arrows before pressing enter.

Re: Apple unveils new accessibility features

#312
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 listen to a lot of podcasts and YouTube videos at 3x or 4x speed now, having slowly built up the skill over a few years. It's pretty nice now and saves time, and it's remarkable how well the human brain can adapt to such input.

I took a course in speed reading, learning to read straight down the middle of the page, and I was able to go through War and Peace in 20 minutes. It’s about Russia.

Re: Apple unveils new accessibility features

#313
post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Even though it's showing its age (and support is being phased out in recent builds), I still liked IntelliJ with the Touch Bar laptop.

https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/touch-bar-support.html

Having the Touch Bar screen show up the relevant buttons for the context I was in was really nice compared to trying to remember which F key was which debug option.

A "I wish..." would have been a $200 usb bar and hub that could sit right behind my keyboard for a desktop.

Re: Apple unveils new accessibility features

#314
This feels like cart before the horse.

As of macOS 15 (and I don't think they fixed it in 26), you can only increase the font size of first-party apps on macOS.

The global font size setting doesn't apply to third-party apps, even those built using Apple's frameworks.

Re: Apple unveils new accessibility features

#315
post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you recall 3 lines of dialogue from the latest movie you watched?

If you're listening to a podcast at 3x you're trying to learn something. No one is trying to learn watching a movie.

Podcasts aren't entirely learning, a lot of podcasts are pure entertainment, such as comedy podcasts.

Sure you can "learn" something from a Sports Podcast or a Comedy Podcast, but you could also say you are "learning" from a podcast which just reads out random numbers. You could "learn" at 33 minutes, 11 seconds, the number 6 is read out, then 8, then 1 but I wouldn't call that learning, or at least its pointless learning.

Re: Apple unveils new accessibility features

#316

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 h…

Sadly, judging by the info I read on the website now, it seems to be focused on using AI assistance.

Not going to lie, it deeply worries me how quickly society is just accepting offloading what used to be meaningful human interactions to AI. I hate to imagine what a society looks like once the people in it solely rely on AI for navigating life.

Sorry for the bleak reply. I was genuinely excited to read about the service as you described it and would love to hear that the human assistance side of it still works even if the website only showcases the AI.

Re: Apple unveils new accessibility features

#317
Cool, but why is Apple making the new iPhone 17e chips in Israel when Israel just coordinated a mass terrorist attack using pagers? I personally don't want my iPhone being used as a bomb if I say something to criticize Israel. Israel is the last place I want to have anything to do with my phone.

Re: Apple unveils new accessibility features

#318
this is exactly how you fight people’s notion that AI is bad. you change their lives with it. make it something indispensable for a subset of users so that being anti-AI is indefensible. for instance, “how dare you threaten people’s ability to navigate the world independently”

Re: Apple unveils new accessibility features

#319
post #81

"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?

>Maybe just don't wear them in a car? Why not?

We probably do need laws to prevent people watching movies in an Apple Vision Pro whilst driving.

We have harsh laws on using phones whilst driving, a Vision Pro (if configured in a specific way) could entirely block your vision with a Movie or Show and this is dangerous.

Re: Apple unveils new accessibility features

#320

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…

Man I miss the touch bar. Never got why people hated it so much

[deleted]
Post reply on HN