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Apple unveils new accessibility features

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Re: Apple unveils new accessibility features

#321

Post by codebje »

rjrjrjrj wrote: post #243
SmirkingRevenge wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I didn't like it, and was happy when they got rid of it. But I didn't hate it. I did hate the butterfly keyboard that was introduced at the same time. Probably Apple's biggest hardware mistake of the past 15 years or so.

I am fortunate enough to have both a butterfly keyboard MBP and a touch bar MBP. Obviously the butterfly keyboard has the known issues, but the touch bar MBP also has the very common issues with that hardware.

I can replace the butterfly keycaps myself. It's something like $10 from aliexpress for a full set of keycaps and clips and a minute's work to pop the busted one and replace it. Annoying, but not fatal.

The touch bar needs a full battery, keyboard, track pad, and upper case replacement to fix. I just have to live that that thing flickering brightly at me every day, or spend AU$500+ to get it fixed.

IMO the touch bar is the bigger mistake.

Re: Apple unveils new accessibility features

#322

Post by plufz »

prepend wrote: post #264
mjamesaustin wrote: post #196

Earlier 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.

Even without tactile elements it was two keys to use function keys. I would have been fine with the touchbar if it just default displayed function keys. Hitting fn+f5 to quicksave is annoying.

But wasn’t that just a setting changing it to default to fn? It was some time since I last used them…

Re: Apple unveils new accessibility features

#323

Post by lern_too_spel »

kube-system wrote: post #270
lern_too_spel wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The dust settled on these accessibility features years ago. Why would Apple choose not to do these things? Live captions in particular is useful even for those who are not hard of hearing because it lets people watch uncaptioned videos in environments that are too noisy or that need to be quiet.

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.

Re: Apple unveils new accessibility features

#324

Post by shawn_w »

s0rce wrote: post #276
bayindirh wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not metallic glass. It's an injectable , super strong alloy. You can manufacture things like you're using injection molded plastic. To be honest, British also has an injectable stainless steel, but its application domain is much more different.

Are you sure? Liquid metal was the name of a bulk metallic glass. There were usb flash drives using it as a case https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquidmetal . Wikipedia lists apple licensing this technology. Metal injection molding is also a thing but I haven't heard it called liquid metal. Usually its MIM.

Shoot, the article even outright says

>Liquidmetal has also notably been used for making the SIM ejector tool of some iPhone 3Gs made by Apple Inc., shipped in the US.

Re: Apple unveils new accessibility features

#325

Post by lern_too_spel »

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…

There's nothing agentic about these features. Live captions have existed on other platforms for more than 6 years now, before "agentic" had even been coined.

Re: Apple unveils new accessibility features

#326

Post by lern_too_spel »

MagicMoonlight wrote: post #80

And this is why androidlets will never win. They’re too busy selling your data to ever think of disabled people or usability. iOS is just painfully good. I can pause a video, put my finger on text inside the video, and copy it. Until they added it, I didn’t even know how much I needed that.

Live captions has existed for more than 6 years on Android. https://ai.googleblog.com/2019/10/on-device-captioning-with-...

Selecting text from anything displayed on the screen for more than 7 years. https://www.thurrott.com/mobile/android/165834/android-9-pie...

I guess if you knew people using Android, you would have known you needed it 7 years ago?

Re: Apple unveils new accessibility features

#327

Post by MBCook »

shagie wrote: post #313
sysworld wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

no2 is what annoyed me the most. I liked it for the most part, but it was never updated, even on the software side we had very few changes. It could've been great.

Even though it's showing its age (and support is being phased out in recent builds), I still liked IntelliJ with the Touch Bar laptop. https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/touch-bar-support.html Having the Touch Bar screen show up the relevant buttons for the context I was in was really nice compared to trying to remember which F key was which debug option. A "I wish..." would have been a $200 usb bar and hub that cou…

That was one of my two primary uses!

The other was I made some Shortcuts that were very handy for me and set them up as buttons. It’s been over a year, I still miss them.

One would pop up a dialog I could type a Jira ticket number into and it would open it. I tried to do that with Salesforce but they’re insane so you can’t.

My favorite would open my next meeting. Know I have a meeting in 5 minutes? Hit the button and my browser would open the right Google Meet or Zoom and come to the front.

So useful.

The desktop problem is a real one too. It was great… as long as you only use your laptop as a laptop or your keyboard. Use anything else and you list it.

iMac? No. Mac Pro? No. Mac Mini? Don’t be stupid. No.

MBP only.

Re: Apple unveils new accessibility features

#328

Post by paul7986 »

bookofjoe wrote: post #200
paul7986 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And their upcoming smart glasses are the best UX for almost everything they showed the user holding up her phone for. I read their glasses when taking video or pics the lense will light up and or flash more prominently then Metas. Maybe that will help the whole privacy issue and also it's not Meta (do love my Meta or smart glasses as a whole will ditch Metas for Apple quickly as both pair of Metas broke & there's no…

Same for me! Both pairs of Metas are now inoperative because I can't get them back to factory reset. Once you pull that little blue tab out of them when they're new, it's GAME OVER.

Well do want to add more detail. First pair bought in Oct 2023 and used them up until March 2025 where a software update hosed them. Then in April 2025 bought a new pair that lasted til the end of June 2025 cause of water splashes. So i two pairs of dumb sunglasses until March 2026 when my pair with the water damage came back alive.

Overall tho Meta doesn't make durable smart glasses and they only have two flagships store for support while Apple has tons of stores for tech support.

Re: Apple unveils new accessibility features

#329

Post by socalgal2 »

taeric wrote: post #292
jorvi wrote: post #290

Earlier 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.…

Vision is hilarious as it is more than just a solution looking for a problem. It was also desperately avoiding the current market that exists for it. Anything but games, it seemed.

Even more strange given 60-70% of all app store revenue for Apple is games - see Epic vs Apple trial for data

Re: Apple unveils new accessibility features

#330

Post by jkman »

mistersquid wrote: post #289
jkman wrote: post #102

Earlier 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…

That still doesn't make sense. "improvements... would likely be required before this could ship to larger populations" so what? Are they claiming that everyone everywhere should use this immediately?

"possibility of an accessibility affordance" what do you mean possibility, that is literally the case. Even if it's not perfect (which nothing truly is, obviously), it is undeniably a novel control system for its target audience.

"doesn’t feel right" So your point is simply that your subjective opinion is that it 'doesn't feel right'? What does that even mean? I'm not saying, and the announcement is not saying, that this is some platonic ideal of accessibility controls. Not sure what you are getting at at all.

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