291–300 of 400 posts
Thank you, Apple, for taking accessibility seriously and dedicating resources towards it.
I very much appreciate it, and the work of the entire accessibility team.
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…
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.…
As someone slowly and idiopathically losing their hearing, and as someone just... getting older and losing visual acuity... Thank you, Apple, for taking accessibility seriously and dedicating resources towards it. I very much appreciate it, and the work of the entire accessibility team.
And what about windows (if you use it) ?
I think that we should all be concerned by the accessibility feature, we never know what is going to happen in life.
Honestly as a blind person and blind developer myself, most of these features get a shrug at best. For one, there's already a bunch of third-party apps that do most if not all of this (Seeing AI, Envision AI, BeMyEyes, Aira, etc.). So at best, this does what all those apps are doing but faster and on-device, which may or may not mean it is also more inaccurate, we'll have to see. In the meantime, Mac OS's screen read…
Funnily enough we're creating a competitor of these third party app that you mention, with the huge experience of my colleague that is son of blind parents.
We have an mvp online but it's not much yet and i really don't want to be the "do you know i have an app?" guy.
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…
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.…
Read this ars quote from 2010 [0]:
>Apple used the small part—one that is not integral to the device’s functionality—to see if the company was capable or producing a custom design to Apple’s specifications. Typically, manufacturers prefer to have at least two sources for parts, so that a supply problem from one supplier won’t halt manufacturing. Since Liquidmetal is only available from one source, Apple needed to make sure the company could deliver.
For Apple Silicon, there was no way they'd make the switch in one go, so they had to figure out a way to hedge that bet. That's what the TouchBar really was, with all its warts and solutions for problems nobody had.
And as someone else in this thread pointed out, the first custom cellular chip wasn't released with a flagship model - they exclusively paired it with the budget iPhone 16e.
Apple is always calculating and hedging.
[0]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2010/08/apple-tested-liquidm...
As someone slowly and idiopathically losing their hearing, and as someone just... getting older and losing visual acuity... Thank you, Apple, for taking accessibility seriously and dedicating resources towards it. I very much appreciate it, and the work of the entire accessibility team.
Have you ever tried the accessibility feature on Android ? Would you recommend one or the other for your use case ? And what about windows (if you use it) ? I think that we should all be concerned by the accessibility feature, we never know what is going to happen in life.
I can tell you that the hearing accommodations on the AirPod Pro 2/3 headphones brought literal tears to my eyes because of how fabulous it makes music sound for me.
This is a a LOT more work than just adding an equalizer because you have to do multiband real time compression and expansion, in relation to other frequency bands and respecting band-specific sound energy limits.
I know I might sound like I’m gushing, and I kinda’ am. They didn’t have to put in the time or energy to do that or maintain it and they did ... and for that, like I said, I am extraordinarily grateful.
Honestly as a blind person and blind developer myself, most of these features get a shrug at best. For one, there's already a bunch of third-party apps that do most if not all of this (Seeing AI, Envision AI, BeMyEyes, Aira, etc.). So at best, this does what all those apps are doing but faster and on-device, which may or may not mean it is also more inaccurate, we'll have to see. In the meantime, Mac OS's screen read…
One thing confused me though - you felt like the on-device processing is likely a gimmick. I naively assumed this is a big deal because it means it always work, regardless of your cell service. On the subway, on an airplane, in the middle of nowhere, etc.
Unrelated, what app makes the biggest difference to you in your day to day life?
Generated subtitles for video does sound useful. Sometimes actors mumble so horribly, I don’t understand a word they’re saying.
My biggest gripe with Netflix is that they only have like 3 languages and no auto translation. And even bigger gripe is that it's because of the union racket. They apparently need to pay hundreds of thousands for something computers do for free. Insanity.
Honestly as a blind person and blind developer myself, most of these features get a shrug at best. For one, there's already a bunch of third-party apps that do most if not all of this (Seeing AI, Envision AI, BeMyEyes, Aira, etc.). So at best, this does what all those apps are doing but faster and on-device, which may or may not mean it is also more inaccurate, we'll have to see. In the meantime, Mac OS's screen read…
And it was valuable to me as someone going from "bad but correctable" vision to low vision. I didn't know all those apps existed. I've been looking for exactly that sort of assistive technology.
Seems like everyone skipped over this part, but optical controls for motorized wheelchairs is a cool idea (at least to me, maybe that's an old idea). Full VR hasn't done well, but it does continue to make me wonder if there's a market for a stripped and slimmed device. I'd maybe be interested in a device that does optical controls if it fit in regular-sized glasses. I'd be super interested if it had a HUD system (eve…
It's been done for a while - follow the links to who they reference. ie https://www.tolt.tech but it's their integration they've done into the OS is interesting.