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Apple unveils new accessibility features

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Re: Apple unveils new accessibility features

#221

Post by bigyabai »

brokencode wrote: post #190
nrmitchi wrote: post #164

These are great improvements, it's good to see Apple investing in improvements like this (especially with the Vision Pro) but I can't help but feel that they utility will remain very low until they make the Vision Pro look significantly less distopian than it does. The form-factor is a significant issue for real-world usage, and it's kind of unclear if there is a plan for a future product line given its (pretty abysm…

I don’t think abysmal is the right word. The hardware was widely praised except for being dorky looking and a few other complaints. The price and lack of content and developer interest have been the main problems. And ultimately, people just don’t seem that interested in this product category. Meta ran into the same issue, though at least they targeted gaming where there is a decent niche. VR/AR tech seems cool and f…

Meta did sell over 20 million headsets. The Quest is definitely lower-margin hardware than Vision Pro, but in terms of install base that's an order of magnitude larger audience.

Apple really screwed themselves by only supporting WebXR for cross-platform VR experiences. Soon Valve will ship the Steam Frame, which will likely cost a fraction of the Vision Pro and support bog-standard PC games like H3VR, flight simulators and flatscreen PC titles. Meanwhile, AVP owners will have paid $3,500 for a more powerful chip/headset with a fraction of the content library and featureset that Valve and Meta offer. Vision Pro's lack of audience is entirely a self-imposed failure, it seems.

Re: Apple unveils new accessibility features

#222

Post by 0x457 »

SmirkingRevenge wrote: post #194
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…

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

1) First generation made ESC button a touch button. Aside from ergonomics (or lack of them), at least for me, on a psychological level "abort" button needs to be something you can smash. Also, macOS already had the worst input handling under load, making it virtual button made it worse.

2) While "happy path" on macOS pretty much never requires you to use Fkeys, but my workflow does. Blindly using touch buttons is harder than real buttons.

3) I'm not huge media keys users, but I bet #2 applies here as well.

I liked the touchbar in every other sense. If it was just an addition to an existing keyboard, people wouldn't have hate it[];

[]: At that time it was hard to not be frustrated using mac (butterfly keyboard etc), so touchbar might have gotten more hate than it deserved because of overall frustration.

Re: Apple unveils new accessibility features

#223

Post by latexr »

happyPersonR wrote: post #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.

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

They are there for everyone. You don’t need to have a permanent disability to benefit from accessibility features. A device designed to work one handed is useful to someone without an arm or a person with two arms who is holding a baby. Subtitles are useful to someone who can’t hear or someone lying to a sleeping spouse or in a noisy place.

“Accessibility needs can be permanent, temporary or situational.”

https://www.coursearc.com/accessibility-content-fundamentals...

Re: Apple unveils new accessibility features

#225

Post by nozzlegear »

throwaway132448 wrote: post #88
yreg wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Because the more we reject our shared reality and substitute it with each our own, the less humane we become.

The AVP is primarily an AR device, not VR.

Re: Apple unveils new accessibility features

#226

Post by gregoryl »

webstrand wrote: post #148
kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Another fun thing is if you use an extension you can fast-forward through the advertisements too. For some channels I use around 3.5x playback speed.

Ublock origin blocks the ads entirely on Firefox.

Re: Apple unveils new accessibility features

#228

Post by duskwuff »

miki123211 wrote: post #112
chipotle_coyote wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> accessibility has a dedicated, earlier press release

IIRC, it's timed to land around Global Accessibility Awareness Day (May 21).

https://accessibility.day/

Re: Apple unveils new accessibility features

#229

Post by alwillis »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #60
RobMurray wrote: post #41

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…

> I strongly suspect that the "coming soon" part of this means "after we integrate Google Gemini models into the system…"

I don’t think the Google's tech has anything to do with these features.

This would had to have been in the works long before the Google announcement. Also, these are enhancements of existing iOS and macOS features. They don’t require an LLM anyway; these features use Apple’s Machine Learning models.

For example, creating subtitles for videos? iOS 16 introduced Live Captions for FaceTime calls in 2022 [1].

[1]: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2022/05/apple-previews-innova...

Re: Apple unveils new accessibility features

#230

Post by wahnfrieden »

titzer wrote: post #189
Invictus0 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

try wisprflow and then tell us it's good

I just installed this and already despise its pricing model. I trust this product approximately zero.

there are plenty of free alternatives using the same models
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