Apple's accessibility updates

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  • Saka's Avatar
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    Today, 18th of May, is the Global Accessibility Awareness Day. To celebrate that, Apple shared a press release announcing several changes to accessibility features. While Apple can be rightfully criticized for their questionable business practices and hermetic ecosystem locking users down, they are undeniably a pioneer when it comes to accessibility. A lot of people with disabilities feel like they can't buy any other phones than iPhones due to reliability when it comes to supporting the accessibility features. If Apple introduces something in the software, it generally just works, and if it doesn't, then a timely fix is provided. I wish I could say the same about, for example, Samsung and the broken hearing aid streaming that's been dealing with critical bugs for around a year now.

    The changes announced by Apple are for example choices regarding the visualisation of menu items, to better fit the user's vision needs, optional clear display of navigational interface for easing cognitive load (or perhaps motor issues as well! some gestures may be tricky to do if hands have some issues), improvements in captioning and text-to-speech, as well as readers for low-vision users.

    The big news is that a lot of the new and existing features will be available on all M2 Mac computers and some M1 ones as well. Especially exciting part is that, until now, no computers supported streaming to hearing devices. While the M1/2 computers utilize similar chips as the phones, it is still a step forward. I really hope that this will put pressure on the developers to make such a feature common place. I know some Mac users with hearing loss who are really excited about this change and looking forward to upgrading their old Macs in order to use the feature.

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    Apple is also going to celebrate by launching sign language support with the customer service in additional countries (Germany, Italy, Spain, and South Korea) expanding from the existing support in the U.S., Canada, U.K., France, Australia, and Japan.
    Some Apple Stores will have accessibility-related sessions to explain the available features to customers, on Apple Podcasts there will be hosted talks related to the topic of accessibility and Apple TV will promote movies and series curated by communities with disabilities.

    The press release can be found here.
    Unamused Snarktooth. Advocate for hearing loss & accessibility. Person, friend and a terrible/terrific* artist.
    *delete as appropriate
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  • MariamTarek's Avatar
    Level 16
    this is amazing news and I'm sure this is only the start of something even better 🎴
    Work Hard, Game Harder