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Posted by interpol_p 17 hours ago

Apple unveils new accessibility features(www.apple.com)
632 points | 325 commentspage 3
percentcer 13 hours ago|
Unfortunate thumbnail on that embedded video
fckgw 10 hours ago|
It's a picture of a blind person. The type of person these features are for.
sscaryterry 12 hours ago||
Luckily the European Accessibility Act has pretty much made PDF/UA a requirement.

This should really be the last resort.

RobMurray 12 hours ago|
Accessible PDFs are quite rare in reality. Especially if there are tables, graphics, maths, forms or anything more than plane text.
sscaryterry 12 hours ago||
Agreed, it is a problem, but it is being legislated in as required for many businesses in the EU going forward.
dawnerd 14 hours ago||
Didn’t they already have subtitle generation for uncaptioned video?

Edit: was thinking about this feature https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/get-live-captions-of-...

gobdovan 15 hours ago||
I'm not blind but I sometimes I can't process where things are, even if in front of me. Would be cool to just point to a messy table and see where the keys are. If they offer this as some Vision/Core ML feature, I'd implement the messy table app as soon as these features land. Probably already possible, but simpler if they release this.
abhinav-t 13 hours ago||
These are pretty helpful features for differently abled people. I think it would be really cool if Apple made AI glasses that could communicate with the iPhone thus eliminating the need to point your phone at everything (especially, if you are moving outdoors or in a crowd).
asadotzler 10 hours ago|
We use "disabled people" these days. Or, "people with disabilities." There's debate around person first or not, but I'll leave that to you all to read up one. Regardless of where you come down on DP vs PWD, "differently abled" is a thing of the past.
mistersquid 16 hours ago||
> A new power wheelchair control feature leverages the precision eye-tracking system on Apple Vision Pro to offer a responsive input method for compatible alternative drive systems. [0]

The above caption for Apple Vision Pro is for a video that to me, as an Apple Vision Pro user, is discomforting.

More questions are raised than are answered by the short video: Is the user able to fit the Apple Vision Pro by him/herself? What happens when dwelling on a directional control misregisters? Can the user recalibrate the "Eyes and Hands" setting? Dwelling on a control displaces focus and there may be impeding objects in the path of the power wheelchair. Is this really a good idea?

To my sensibility, the video is unsettling (at best), especially given how cumbersome Apple Vision Pro is.

[0] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/05/apple-unveils-new-acc...

jkman 14 hours ago|
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 back again every single day - their nurse could just put on their Vision Pro for them! This seems like an incredible leap forward for people in this situation, if they iterate on this and it gets better then this could be a very viable wheelchair control system in the future.
mistersquid 8 hours ago||
> 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 depicted in the video.

My sense is that the possibility of an accessibility affordance with people who are severely disabled is driving opinions in this case more than the reality of what’s available.

To my mind, much of these AX announcements are reminiscent of the circumstance that led John Gruber to author “Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino”, which is that these are not shipping features but ones slated for “some time later this year”.

I’m a huge AX fan and work directly in the domain space, but something about that video in particular coupled with my near-daily use of Apple Vision Pro doesn’t feel right.

jaybeavers 2 hours ago|||
You are correct, the driving controls in AVP don’t use dwell, that is the wrong (and dangerous) approach. They use something more akin to hover activation.

It’s the hardware I designed coupling the power wheelchair to the AVP, and I’ve driven it myself.

jkman 3 hours ago|||
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.

halapro 12 hours ago||
Are these already available? I regularly read these announcements and years later I still don't know where to find them, or are not actually functional.
dgllghr 15 hours ago||
Putting aside the fact that no company should have direct access to anyone's brain, how cool would it be to be building toward VISOR (from TNG) instead of this. If we could translate sensor signals to the neural circuitry of the brain directly, we wouldn't even need an LLM in the mix. But to have it as an overlay, as supplementary data! With the ability to turn it off of course. (Would a person even be able to turn it off? In the same sense as whether someone can "turn off" social media?) If only we had meaningful human rights and institutions that really protected them... I still can't fully give up the techno-optimism that made me love tech in the first place (and TNG for that matter).
dagmx 14 hours ago|
Brain Control Interface support was already announced last year and afaik is part of iOS already.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/accessibility/brai...

exitb 16 hours ago|
As Apple shifts towards services and fancy software features, I wonder how do they expect to stay competitive by only releasing them for a subset of languages.
layer8 14 hours ago|
They roughly know how many of their users use a particular language.
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