Apple announces new accessibility features, including eye tracking
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Re: Apple announces new accessibility features, including eye tracking
#2This is one major advantage to Apple sharing a foundation across all their devices. Vision Pro introduced eye tracking to their systems as a new input modality, and now it trickles down to their other platforms.
I am surprised CarPlay didn’t have voice control before this though.
Re: Apple announces new accessibility features, including eye tracking
#3I wonder what new voices will be added to VoiceOver? We blind people never, ever thought Eloquence, an old TTS engine from 20 years ago now, would ever come to iOS. And yet, here it is in iOS 17. I wouldn't be surprised to see DecTalk, or more Siri voices. More Braille features is amazing, and they even mentioned the Mac! VoiceOver for Mac is notoriously never given as much love as VoiceOver for iOS is, so most blind people still use Windows, even though they have iPhones.
I was expecting to see much better image descriptions, but they've already announced a ton of new stuff for plenty other disabilities. Having haptic music will be awesome even for me, adding another sense to the music. There are just so many new accessibility stuff, and I can't wait to see what all is really new in VoiceOver, since there's always new things not talked about in WWDC or release notes. I'm hoping that, one day, we get a tutorial for VoiceOver, like TalkBack on Android has, since there are so many commands, gestures, and settings that a new user never learns unless they learn to learn about them.
Re: Apple announces new accessibility features, including eye tracking
#4This is one major advantage to Apple sharing a foundation across all their devices. Vision Pro introduced eye tracking to their systems as a new input modality, and now it trickles down to their other platforms. I am surprised CarPlay didn’t have voice control before this though.
It would be amazing if it gets carried over to the Mac.
Re: Apple announces new accessibility features, including eye tracking
#5I wonder what new voices will be added to VoiceOver? We blind people never, ever thought Eloquence, an old TTS engine from 20 years ago now, would ever come to iOS. And yet, here it is in iOS 17. I wouldn't be surprised to see DecTalk, or more Siri voices. More Braille features is amazing, and they even mentioned the Mac! VoiceOver for Mac is notoriously never given as much love as VoiceOver for iOS is, so most blind…
The image description stuff is already surprisingly good - I noticed when I got a photo text while driving and it described it well enough for me to know what it was.
Re: Apple announces new accessibility features, including eye tracking
#6iOS 17 Image Descriptions are quite good, but audio descriptions don't seem to work on non-Pro devices, even though text descriptions are being shown on the screen and the audio menu is present and activated. Is that a bug?
Even on Pro devices, audio image descriptions stop working after a few cycles of switching between Image Magnifier and apps/home. This can be fixed by restarting the app and disabling/enabling audio image descriptions, but that breaks the use case when an iPhone is dedicated to running only Image Magnifier + audio descriptions, via remote MDM with no way for the local blind user to restart the app.
On-device iOS image descriptions could be improved if the user could help train the local image recognition by annotating photos or videos with text descriptions. For a blind person, this would enable locally-specific audio descriptions like "bedroom door", "kitchen fridge" or specific food dishes.
Are there other iOS or Android AR apps which offer audio descriptions of live video from the camera?
Re: Apple announces new accessibility features, including eye tracking
#7I wonder if this announcement had anything to do with the bombshells OpenAI and Google dropped this week. Couldn’t this have been part of WWDC next month?
Re: Apple announces new accessibility features, including eye tracking
#8This is one major advantage to Apple sharing a foundation across all their devices. Vision Pro introduced eye tracking to their systems as a new input modality, and now it trickles down to their other platforms. I am surprised CarPlay didn’t have voice control before this though.
CarPlay devices aren't really powerful.
Re: Apple announces new accessibility features, including eye tracking
#9I love accessibility features because they might be the last features developed solely with the benefit of the user in mind. So many other app/os features are designed to steal your attention or gradually nerf usefulness.
Re: Apple announces new accessibility features, including eye tracking
#10I love accessibility features because they might be the last features developed solely with the benefit of the user in mind. So many other app/os features are designed to steal your attention or gradually nerf usefulness.
> developed solely with the benefit of the user in mind
Hopefully accessibility features are never artificially segmented to higher priced devices.