Most of your favorite Apple products offer a raft of useful accessibility features that address everything from sight and hearing loss to mobility issues, but rarely have we seen so many of them updated at once and, in some cases, so significantly. Apple made the announcements to coincide with Global Accessibility Awareness Day (May 13).
Perhaps the most notable update is Personal Voice, an accessibility tool designed to capture and recreate the voice of someone who may be losing the ability to speak. It’s a potentially powerful communication tool for those with speech difficulties. When I tried it a couple of years ago, the system coached you through speaking 150 phrases and took almost 24 hours to build the voice.
It appears that the update that Apple will release later this year can produce an even better voice recreation in a fraction of the time and effort. Personal Voice will soon only need 10 phrases and a few minutes to build a remarkable simulacrum of a voice.
This is just one of many updates coming to the Apple ecosystem for the world’s roughly 1.3 billion disabled people.
For the vision-impaired, there’s the new Magnifier for Mac, which lets you attach your iPhone to your Mac and then feed that video through to your desktop. There, you can fix the image if it’s skewed, adjust colors, brightness, and contrast, and alter the fonts to make them more readable, even sharpening the text, if necessary. The example given was a woman attending a classroom lecture. She had her phone attached to the side of her MacBook, as it captured the whiteboard notes.
Similarly, there’s a new assistive reading experience called Accessibility Reader for iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Vision Pro that also uses the iPhone to capture textbook pages and lets you adjust the view on your Mac screen, including the fonts, background colors, font size, and more.
Apple iPods will be gaining some new tinnitus amelioration capabilities that mostly involve applying ambient noises, and will include EQ-style adjustments and times for the length of ambient noise playback.
There’s also an update to Live Listen, which takes the audio around you and funnels it to your AirPods for easier listening. This update adds captions you can read on your Apple Watch.
Braille and Accessibility Nutrition Labels
For Braille users, Apple is adding Braille Access, which will let you launch apps, create notes, and make quick math calculations in the Braille style of your choice.
Even Vision Pro is getting a few accessibility updates, including the ability to zoom in on any real-world image.
Apple is also making it easier for you to quickly use an unfamiliar Apple device by temporarily sharing all your accessibility settings with the new device.
Those who use eye tracking to control their iPhone or iPad will now have the option of using switch (usually connected to a physical switch outside the device) or dwell (pausing on the icon or feature for some time) to make selections
Finally, Apple’s App Store is adding Accessibility Nutrition Labels to apps. Each one will cover how the app addresses accessibility features like Voice Over, Voice Control, Larger Text, Dark Interfaces, and Reduce Motion. Labels will link to more details and even to developer accessibility pages outside the App Store.
Developers will learn more about how they can add these details to their app descriptions at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in June.
It’s not clear when this year we should expect these updates, though iOS 19 (along with iPadOS 19, the next macOS, and other platform updates), which is expected to arrive later this year, is a reasonable guess.
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lance.ulanoff@futurenet.com (Lance Ulanoff)
