Apple has announced a wide range of new accessibility features on their devices for people with visual and/or hearing impairments. These features include live captions, braille readers, personal voice replication, and more.
Apple recently announced that they will be implementing a wide range of new accessibility features for iOS that focuses on helping individuals with visual and/or hearing impairments. Last Thursday was Global Accessibility Awareness Day, and Apple made the announcement one day prior to raise awareness for accessibility in technology.
Some of these new iOS features include live captions, personal voice replication, improved tools for reading, and braille reader upgrades. The company will also be adding “nutritional labels” in the app store that will require developers to list the specific accessibility features their app has, according to reports.
Sarah Herrlinger, Apple’s senior director of global accessibility policy and initiatives, recently spoke to the Guardian Australia about these upgrades, stating that the nutrition labels specifically will ideally encourage app developers to include more accessibility options in the future.
“[It] gives them a real opportunity to understand what it means to be accessible and why they should do it and then build on that,” she stated.
“By doing it this way, we’re also giving app developers the opportunity to grow into it; maybe there are a couple of the features that they already are doing really well, and they get an opportunity to highlight those as they learn about the other ones and start to build those.”
Apple will also be making improvements on its magnifier app as a part of these upgrades. The app can now be downloaded onto Macs so users can use their camera or an attached iPhone to zoom into screens, which they cited as being helpful for individuals who need to read presentations or lectures.
The magnifier will allow users to adjust brightness, contrast, colors, and settings to better see texts and images.
Visually impaired users will now have note-taking abilities with a braille screen input or a compatible braille device. It will also allow for calculations to be made using Nemeth braille, which is known as the standard code for math and science.
Apple is also implementing a new personal voice feature that allows users to have their voices recreated using just 10 phrases. The company currently has the same feature, however, it requires users to say 150 phrases and they must wait overnight for them to be able to use it.
As Apple has been incorporating artificial intelligence more and more into their devices, Herrlinger explained they’ve been prioritizing implementing AI into their accessibility features more.
“We’ve actually been deeply working with our AI team for many years on features. And so as new opportunities arise, we always make sure that we’re staying as cutting-edge as we can to build the best tech we can.”
Apple’s live captions feature, Live Listen, allows users to get improved audio through their AirPods when in public places. AirPods themselves were also recently launched to be used as hearing aids as well.
Herrlinger also defended Apple from claims that their accessibility options also come at a more expensive price.
“It is available to you right out of the box at no additional charge,” she said.
“Our goal is to build in a wide array of accessibility features, because we also know that every person’s experience in the world is unique and so different people will use different accessibility features to support them, whether that be strictly around one disability or maybe multiple disabilities that they have.”
Herrlinger went on to say that having all of these features on one main device for users is more economical overall.
“Now they’re all just built into a single device that is the same cost to everyone. So in our mind, it’s more about that democratisation of accessibility within the operating system.”
Eric Mastrota is a Contributing Editor at The National Digest based in New York. A graduate of SUNY New Paltz, he reports on world news, culture, and lifestyle. You can reach him at eric.mastrota@thenationaldigest.com.
