by JeremyHerrman
8 subcomments
- 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 and took over several responsibilities away from intel chipsets like power management, fans, sleep/wake, access to the camera & mic, and the secure enclave powering touch ID. Then the T2 added encryption of the SSD, audio management, image processing for the camera, and prevented tampering with the boot process
- The iPhone 3G shipped with a Liquidmetal SIM eject tool, which is made from a strong custom metal alloy which is "practically unbendable by hand unless you want to hurt or cut your fingers." Although Apple hasn’t released anything with the alloy since then, now nearly 20 years later Apple is rumored to be using liquid metal in their upcoming foldable iPhone.
- RealityKit had 3D scanning and a lot of other cool AR capabilities for years which didn’t make sense until the Apple Vision Pro was released.
by brightbeige
5 subcomments
- A while ago I signed up as a sighted person on Be My Eyes. I didn't get as many calls as I had hoped, but I was glad to help out on the few that I could. One call was to read envelopes of incoming mail, another was to read pill bottles, and then there was the two funny guys on big cozy chairs with shopping bags of cereal boxes and wanted to know what was what. I remember one guy really didn't like one type. The app had a unique feature for the sighted person to turn on the camera of the vision impaired person.
https://www.bemyeyes.com
by postalcoder
13 subcomments
- One thing Apple really needs to get right is speech to text transcription. They've nailed accessibility in so many ways and yet it feels like they're a decade behind on properly transcribing voices. At least half a decade.
Input on the iPhone is so dreadful nowadays. Their palm rejection is definitely worse than before, so mistyping is more frequent. Their text-correction algorithm for typing is worse than before, and it frequently makes incorrect corrections to words that I don't notice, because they change words a few words back from where I typed. And STT hasn't improved. On top of that, my fingers are tired of the phone form factor. Please make the iphone not a chore to use, apple.
- Fun fact: This video was made accessible to sighted people because no blind person would ever listen to voice at that speed. Honestly if you ever observe a blind person using computers you'd impressed how they can listen to audio at unimaginable speeds.
by nechuchelo
8 subcomments
- This looks like a genuinely useful application of LLMs.
I wish more companies focused on how they can help humans instead of replacing us or squeezing us as hard as possible in the name of productivity.
by Brajeshwar
0 subcomment
- All of the brilliant video and voice over was expected, I love the final, “The Apple Logo," that is that taking care of the back of the fences. With AI-this-&-AI-that, the human intuition to think of the unnoticable subtle differentiation will be the thing that stands out of your cohort.
by everforward
2 subcomments
- Seems like everyone skipped over this part, but optical controls for motorized wheelchairs is a cool idea (at least to me, maybe that's an old idea).
Full VR hasn't done well, but it does continue to make me wonder if there's a market for a stripped and slimmed device. I'd maybe be interested in a device that does optical controls if it fit in regular-sized glasses. I'd be super interested if it had a HUD system (even a super basic one that can only show a handful of symbols). Better still if it had some basic audio, but maintaining the "regular glasses" form factor is more important to me than the HUD or audio.
- > The total amount due on the bill is $83.89. Please verify this amount with your utility provider or by using Text Detection before making a
payment.
1. Use AI to determine how much a bill is for
2. Call up the people who billed you and ask them how much they billed you
3. Pay billed amount
by jonnyasmar
0 subcomment
- Different angle from the developer side: Apple's a11y API at the OS level is genuinely good. It's the WebKit-embedded-in-native gap that breaks. Shipped a Tauri app where Monaco editor lived inside WKWebView and found out the hard way that VoiceOver's `accessibilitySupport: auto` mode silently breaks backward text selections in Monaco — only setting it to "off" gave us correct selections. Which meant choosing between functional text selection or VoiceOver support, and the answer was selection.
Rock-solid in AppKit/UIKit. Falls over at the embedded-WebView seam where most modern desktop apps actually live.
by commandersaki
0 subcomment
- Apple accessibility is the #1 reason why I'm in the Apple ecosystem. It does have its shortcomings, but it seems miles ahead of everything else in tech after having tried other ecosystems. It is hard to place a price on these features, but I imagine it is worth significantly more than the base cost of hardware.
- Honestly as a blind person and blind developer myself, most of these features get a shrug at best.
For one, there's already a bunch of third-party apps that do most if not all of this (Seeing AI, Envision AI, BeMyEyes, Aira, etc.). So at best, this does what all those apps are doing but faster and on-device, which may or may not mean it is also more inaccurate, we'll have to see.
In the meantime, Mac OS's screen reader, VoiceOver, has been left to essentially exist in maintenance mode for years, where users have had to build, arguably impressive, third-party solutions to add features to the thing that comparable screen readers on Windows have had for a really long time.
Through that lens, this all looks a bit performative to me, but again, maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised.
The one thing I'm mildly excited to see is the improvement to Voice Control, as guessing what the programmatic name of a button is or having to constantly use a numbers grid to target elements doesn't sound fun.
To respond to what I see in some of the comments:
- On speech rate: It does take quite a bit of practice to crank up the speech rate and there's a degree of retraining you need to do when you switch voices. A lot of more "human" sounding voices are harder to follow at super high speeds which is why a lot of people prefer more robotic but consistent speech and generally aren't convinced by AI-powered TTS yet; they often fall apart if you raise the speech rate past a certain point.
- Re: actually waiting for the target audience's verdict: This is so important. I see more and more companies, individuals etc. talk about accessibility, build accessibility solutions and evangelize AI for accessibility without EVER talking to the people they claim to help.
This will almost certainly mean mistakes will be made, up to and including doing more harm than good.
If you want to do accessibility right, that includes AI products of any kind, hire people with lived experience or you'll get the equivalent of machine-translated text, hackerproof security in one click or an AI-powered coffee bar that orders thousands of rubber gloves.
Coincidental note: I have time for new projects right now :P
- It's a shame Apple removed the screen reader announcements ("the Apple logo") from the youtube version of the commercial.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3SmsSCvoss
Those made the ad stand out in my opinion.
by Darwins_Toffees
8 subcomments
- "Vehicle Motion Cues come to visionOS, which can help reduce motion sickness for people who use Apple Vision Pro as a passenger in a moving vehicle. Vision Pro will also support face gestures for performing taps and system actions, plus a new way to select elements with one’s eyes while using Dwell Control."
Maybe just don't wear them in a car?
- This feels like cart before the horse.
As of macOS 15 (and I don't think they fixed it in 26), you can only increase the font size of first-party apps on macOS.
The global font size setting doesn't apply to third-party apps, even those built using Apple's frameworks.
- On-device video subtitles generation is exciting, should help with watching videos on mute. This seems like a low hanging fruit that should've already been grabbed by an app but I can't find any.
by happyPersonR
2 subcomments
- A lot of us forget it, but things like text to speech, subtitles etc are there for the differently abled
Without that, there wouldn’t really be great vlm and conversational models.
The AI companies might have paid for the dictation of some videos on their own but voice assistants etc wouldn’t have existed and our ability to have AI that eventually understands the world would be much much harder.
by randusername
0 subcomment
- Accessibility features are such a great way to keep technology focused on real-world problems and real-world experiences.
I think the trap in creating anything is doing it for a crowd. Art, software, anything... it turns out better when it is made with a specific, named individual in-mind.
Accessibility features are almost always championed and field-tested with one specific loved one in mind and I think that's what keeps the technical solutions personable and grounded.
- As someone slowly and idiopathically losing their hearing, and as someone just... getting older and losing visual acuity...
Thank you, Apple, for taking accessibility seriously and dedicating resources towards it.
I very much appreciate it, and the work of the entire accessibility team.
- These are great improvements, it's good to see Apple investing in improvements like this (especially with the Vision Pro) but I can't help but feel that they utility will remain very low until they make the Vision Pro look significantly less distopian than it does.
The form-factor is a significant issue for real-world usage, and it's kind of unclear if there is a plan for a future product line given its (pretty abysmal) initial receiption.
- Generated subtitles for video does sound useful. Sometimes actors mumble so horribly, I don’t understand a word they’re saying.
by percentcer
1 subcomments
- Unfortunate thumbnail on that embedded video
by sscaryterry
1 subcomments
- Luckily the European Accessibility Act has pretty much made PDF/UA a requirement.
This should really be the last resort.
- 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-...
- 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.
by abhinav-t
1 subcomments
- 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).
by mistersquid
1 subcomments
- > 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...
- 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.
- 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).
- 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.
by diogenescynic
0 subcomment
- Cool, but why is Apple making the new iPhone 17e chips in Israel when Israel just coordinated a mass terrorist attack using pagers? I personally don't want my iPhone being used as a bomb if I say something to criticize Israel. Israel is the last place I want to have anything to do with my phone.
- actual useful & impactful A.I features not the snake oil being sold daily.
by celsoazevedo
2 subcomments
- Nice. It would be good if Apple could find the time to improve the readability of the white text on green bubbles too.
edit: it seems that asking Apple to follow their own accessibility guidelines isn't popular on HN :-(
- I miss Apple during it's hey-day. There was a time when Apple was the sine qua non for #a11y and #hci. Then Steve came back.
by cybercatgurrl
0 subcomment
- this is exactly how you fight people’s notion that AI is bad. you change their lives with it. make it something indispensable for a subset of users so that being anti-AI is indefensible. for instance, “how dare you threaten people’s ability to navigate the world independently”
by Almondsetat
3 subcomments
- I have difficulty trusting this. There are plenty of videos online of LLMs making up stuff like "I just ate a hot dog, is there mustard around my mouth?" "No, everything is clean" while there is a big yellow stain om the guy's face
- Surely a blind person relies a lot on audio input?
by devinprater
0 subcomment
- There's my dopamine hit for the year.
- Since Apple uses Gemini to power its AI, are those features actually powered by Google Gemini?
by nikhilpareek13
0 subcomment
- Most apps have terrible accessibility labels because developer don't bother, which breaks every screen reader pipeline downstream. The Voice Control "say what you see" feature routes around that by letting users describe a button in plain language. That's a real fix for a problem caused by humans being lazy about ally.
- this is such a great use case for the technology
- Can Apple “unveil” Touch ID as a “new” accessibility feature because Face ID is an accessibility nightmare?
- I feel that if we build the UI for blind users first, we would get much more powerful systems, rather than building UI for the seeing users and then slapping a CV to text model of what's shown on the screens.
Did not test it yet, but blind users may be more prone to dominate Command Line Interfaces, which are becoming increasingly popular due to its easy integration with LLM
- Her phone in the thumbnail has oval camera bumps. It is also extra long. Mine has round camera bumps. Is that a new iphone?
- Kudos to apple for providing some of the best accessibility features across their devices. I’ve always appreciated the consistency of reduce transparency, increased contrast, reduced motion, reduced white point, touch areas, color blindness support. And they work well across third party apps. That demands a lot of effort on the API and UI framework to have broad support for something that is mostly a non-sellable feature.
by MagicMoonlight
3 subcomments
- 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.
- Now we know why the new AirPods will have cameras!
- I'm super glad that they're doing this, but once again unexcited for another decade of Apple self-privileging on this stuff so they're the only ones allowed to touch or improve any of this surface, or UX outside an app's tiny box.
People talk a lot about how MacOS has gone downhill but I feel like it would have been a good start if developers could continue to patch over Apple's shortcomings like they used to be able to.
I imagine that we would be a few years into a spectrum of tools like this if they didn't lock it down like they do.
Totally aware that plenty of HN commenters are very glad that Apple keeps this locked down. I'm just the other opinion, that's all.
by testfrequency
2 subcomments
- I don’t want to discredit more advancements in accessibility, but this feels like accessibility porn.
I have fond memories of an old coworker 10 years ago who is blind. He would use his phone no problem, texting, going about his day, he was even on Tinder (credit to Tinder for making their app so accessible long ago). He would commute on his own, walk to the train station, even transfer to another train during peak rush hour. I’m not saying it was all easy for him, but nothing in this video really stood out to me more than what shirt was on the bed. I know other services/apps have long existed to be the “eyes” for people who need support, but this video feels….uneventful?
I may be cynical about this though, as I often hate how Apple’s marketing makes these emotional bids about how life-critical they are to society - which is fair to a degree..but it just feels cheap to be glamorising “look! we saved this person from pending doom, cool right??”
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