Apple accessibility is the #1 reason why I'm in the Apple ecosystem. It does have its shortcomings, but it seems miles ahead of everything else in tech after having tried other ecosystems. It is hard to place a price on these features, but I imagine it is worth significantly more than the base cost of hardware.
Apple unveils new accessibility features
331–340 of 400 posts
Re: Apple unveils new accessibility features
#332All of the brilliant video and voice over was expected, I love the final, “The Apple Logo," that is that taking care of the back of the fences. With AI-this-&-AI-that, the human intuition to think of the unnoticable subtle differentiation will be the thing that stands out of your cohort.
Re: Apple unveils new accessibility features
#333Earlier quoted context omitted.
Like coding, creating images or text, maybe the alternative of doing it yourself is too easy or enjoyable for you. Don't expect that will be true for everyone.
Did you reply to the wrong person? What are you even trying to say here?
You say you don't trust it but whats your alternative assuming you lost your vision?
Re: Apple unveils new accessibility features
#334Earlier 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…
#1 bothered me the most. A lot.
And the stupid thing was that there was plenty of space for a row of function keys and the touch bar.
Re: Apple unveils new accessibility features
#335Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apple's competitors have had these features for years (Android for 7, Windows for 1), so it's really an indictment of Apple. They give lip service to helping the visually impaired, and this press release is good marketing for the non-visually impaired people who don't know this.
Really? I haven't used Android recently, but I very much doubt 7 year old Talkback was any where near as good as Voiceover. I also haven't seen a single accessibility improvement in Windows recently. The most accessible Windows apps are usually based on older toolkits like win32. Edge is very accessible, but 99% of that comes from Chrome.
https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/platforms/android... worked very well in English when it launched. I'm sure it supports more languages now.
It turns out Windows introduced this feature in 2022, not last year. https://www.elevenforum.com/t/turn-on-or-off-live-captions-i...
I see, you're interested in the screen reader improvement. Android added that in 2024. https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2024/09/talkback-u...
Windows added it in 2025. https://www.accessibility.org.au/narrator-update-brings-ai-d...
Re: Apple unveils new accessibility features
#336One 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…
Yeah they could just take the open whisper model which really is great especially if you use the larger parameter versions. I love it.
Re: Apple unveils new accessibility features
#337A 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 serv…
I see it less bleakly and in a more hopeful manner. For people who signed up to help, I guess it might've felt like a social thing. But I imagine most of the people who relied on the services were looking less for the social aspect and wanted more independence in life. There are probably loads of blind people who are very thankful that they're increasingly able to go outside and live fully functional lives thanks to having a phone and some AI stuff to let them do whatever they want without feeling like they're depending on someone for assistance.
I'm someone who absolutely hates generative AI, but AI that assists people in living happy lives outside is something I'm completely in favor of.
Re: Apple unveils new accessibility features
#338Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 depict…
You are correct, the driving controls in AVP don’t use dwell, that is the wrong (and dangerous) approach. They use something more akin to hover activation.
It’s the hardware I designed coupling the power wheelchair to the AVP, and I’ve driven it myself.
Re: Apple unveils new accessibility features
#339Earlier quoted context omitted.
By "dust settled" I don't mean that the technology "exists" -- but rather that feature development has slowed down and most products have stabilized as feature complete and mature. The on-device ML models that are being used by Google and Apple are both quite new and in active development. Many of Apple's most successful products have shipped years or even a decade after their competitors. They have tried using first…
They're in active development, but they already worked well at launch in English in 2019, serving enough customers to be very useful. I was using it myself.
Yeah, Apple releases most of their products/features long after competitors have useful products/features of the same type. This really isn't any different.
Re: Apple unveils new accessibility features
#340Earlier quoted context omitted.
The hate was because it replaced function keys many people use by tactile touch, without looking. Doing the same on a touch screen is very difficult. If the bar had been added on top of those, I don't think there would've been the same kind of hate for it.
I didn't really mind the fn keys being there. I rarely use function keys unless I'm RDP'd to a Windows machine. What drove me crazy though was the escape key. They later added the physical escape key back but I think at that point it was a bit too late.
I haven't used function keys since I used mainframe applications on a 3270 terminal.