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Apple unveils new accessibility features

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Re: Apple unveils new accessibility features

#111

"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?

Trains. Airplanes. TFA said vehicle, not car.

Re: Apple unveils new accessibility features

#112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know plenty of blind people who have their voice speed unbearably slow and barely scratch the surface of what technology can do for them. I think an interface where you can tell your phone what to do in natural language will really help a lot of less technical people. I'm not getting my hopes up though given apple's history with Siri, which is truly awful.

Apple's history with accessibility is, on the whole, pretty good. I strongly suspect that the "coming soon" part of this means "after we integrate Google Gemini models into the system," so I don't think you should use the current state of Siri as a yardstick. (I actually have decent luck with the current Siri, but I don't push it very much and have sort of adapted myself to its limitations; on the flip side, I have a…

Coming soon very likely means iOS 27.

This has been the typical pattern for Apple for the last few years. The flashy features are announced at WWDC, accessibility has a dedicated, earlier press release. Before this practice, accessibility announcements would usually be tucked in some WWDC slide that most people wouldn't even notice.

Re: Apple unveils new accessibility features

#113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

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.

Playing music at 1x should be a pretty simple feature to add to those apps.

Ideally it should be done while encoding.

Re: Apple unveils new accessibility features

#114
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Honestly if you ever observe a blind person using computers you'd impressed how they can listen to audio at unimaginable speeds. Even better, fire up Orca (or whatever screenreader application your OS comes with) yourself and try to use your computer while shutting your eyes, kind of eye-opening (no pun intended) what kind of experience these sort of users typically get. And also, you quickly start to understand wh…

When I was at Google, I'd periodically test our (internal-only) app with Chromevox with the display off. It's not that it sounded like it would be easy, but it really is a challenge, and I can only imagine the muscle memory built up over time of trying to work around accessibility bugs and strange behaviors. Unfortunately it seems impossible to get all that much funding for accessibility work :/ I wonder what ever ha…

The muscle memory build-up is definitely real.

There are apps I use semi-regularly that less-experienced screen reader users thought were inaccessible, and I couldn't even explain what they were doing wrong from memory. The ways of working around accessibility issues are just so ingrained in me that all I can usually remember is "yeah I did this somehow, but it was six months ago and I have absolutely no idea which specific tricks I needed for this one."

Re: Apple unveils new accessibility features

#115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

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.

Re: Apple unveils new accessibility features

#116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

I'm so glad YouTube and other podcast players have moved to support 3.0 speed. As I get comfortable with one, I move it up some. For things like sports and "did you know" content, I can go 2.5 if I'm not multitasking. For technical content, sometimes I'm stuck at 1.0.

You can get browser extensions to do it for all media controls on any site. YouTube's "Premium" for 3x is laughable when it's an internal browser function.

Re: Apple unveils new accessibility features

#117

"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?

[deleted]

Re: Apple unveils new accessibility features

#118
post #2

> The total amount due on the bill is $83.89. Please verify this amount with your utility provider or by using Text Detection before making a payment. 1. Use AI to determine how much a bill is for 2. Call up the people who billed you and ask them how much they billed you 3. Pay billed amount

Once you paid the same bill for a few months you'll know how much your phone bill will roughly be and you'll not have to do. They obviously have to put that line in there, just like ChatGPT saying "Please verify everything we tell you" in the footer.

Re: Apple unveils new accessibility features

#119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Honestly if you ever observe a blind person using computers you'd impressed how they can listen to audio at unimaginable speeds. Even better, fire up Orca (or whatever screenreader application your OS comes with) yourself and try to use your computer while shutting your eyes, kind of eye-opening (no pun intended) what kind of experience these sort of users typically get. And also, you quickly start to understand wh…

> you quickly start to understand why they set the speech rate for their voice synthesizer to be so fast, it's almost unbearable navigating applications (and particularly lists) otherwise. I imagine that for coding it also helps deal with the fundamental problem of an ephemeral stream rather than a persistent document that you can navigate visually in multiple dimensions. Working memory is limited, and getting more t…

It's not the ephemeral stream that's the problem, it's the limited bandwidth.

You can show a lot more info on a screen than you can transmit through speech in a short period of time. That doesn't mean you read faster than you listen, just that sighted people essentially use their eyeballs as an "input device" to decide what information to look at.

If there's an object on the screen that you want to examine but that you don't need to click, you can just "navigate to it" with your eyeballs, without ever touching a mouse or keyboard. We don't have that luxury.

This means we need a much more efficient system for navigating what's on the screen, but that only gets you so far. Eventually, the easiest way to deal with this problem is just to increase the bandwidth of your channel, and you do that by increasing the speech rate.

Re: Apple unveils new accessibility features

#120
A lot of us forget it, but things like text to speech, subtitles etc are there for the differently abled

Without that, there wouldn’t really be great vlm and conversational models.

The AI companies might have paid for the dictation of some videos on their own but voice assistants etc wouldn’t have existed and our ability to have AI that eventually understands the world would be much much harder.

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