from Hacker News

Previews of software updates designed for people with disabilities

by ArmandGrillet on 5/19/21, 5:19 PM with 161 comments

• by WalterBright on 5/19/21, 6:28 PM

  This is really good stuff, even for abled people. For example, being able the use the watch one-handed is great if your other hand is occupied, like carrying something.

  (The reason I still wear a watch at all is so I can see the time without having to dig the phone out of my pocket and turn it on, which is hopeless while driving.)

  Just like although I can hear, I use closed-captioning when I don't wish to disturb others, or when watching a show at high speed (I can read faster than I can understand speech).

• by crazygringo on 5/19/21, 5:39 PM

  > Everyday sounds can be distracting, discomforting, or overwhelming, and in support of neurodiversity, Apple is introducing new background sounds to help minimize distractions and help users focus, stay calm, or rest. Balanced, bright, or dark noise, as well as ocean, rain, or stream sounds continuously play in the background to mask unwanted environmental or external noise, and the sounds mix into or duck under other audio and system sounds.

  Wow, I never thought of background sounds as something connected to neurodiversity, but TIL.

  I definitely never expected Apple to get into the business of white noise apps, but here they are.

  I wonder what the quality of these sounds will be, how long they'll loop for? And if all the background noise apps that already exist will continue to operate as they do now, or if they'll be able to integrate with this in order to take advantage of the new mixing/ducking features.

• by escapologybb on 5/19/21, 9:47 PM

  My money doesn't seem to fit in any of the slots on my computer...

  Apple just keeps knocking it out of the park and into a completely new sports metaphor assistive technology provision, they really do. Any measure, I'm a massive nerd/geek/hacker and I really have looked into alternatives both in the open source and proprietary basis and nobody at all is assistive technology as well as at all right now.

  It really is as simple as whenever I have a new iShiny, I pounds on the nearest able-bodied monkey and get them to take total box and connected to Wi-Fi and then it's all me. From then on I don't need any more able-bodied assistance whatsoever with setting up the new device, it's awesome. And whilst it's been a few months, the last time I looked known of the other major players were able to come anywhere close to this level of frictionless setup for quadriplegics like me.

  ALSO! ALSO! Let's not forget that this isn't some crappy subset of functions that quadriplegics have to settle for whilst everybody else gets the full fat version of the software. Nope, with very few exceptions pretty much anything an able-bodied person can do with their iShiny I'll be able to do as well. Just a little slower.

  Apple, and specifically their approach to accessibility is only one of many reasons I'm able to work, see my family and generally engage with society as well as I currently do.

  Also, I quite like the term cripple, differently abled or on a good day Stuart. WTF cares what label you give me, I am much more interested in whether this laptop enables me to do the shopping independently and see my Nieces without having to check with an able-bodied person first.

• by shade on 5/19/21, 5:41 PM

  There's a lot of good stuff here, but I have to say I'm disappointed that they still haven't added anything along the lines of Android's Live Captions feature as a system-wide thing for iOS/macOS.

  I generally prefer Apple for their strongly pro-privacy stance, but this is something they're dropping the ball on. After living with this feature in Chrome for a while, it's such a big quality of life improvement that for the first time in years, I'm thinking about jumping to Android even though it would incur some extra costs to do so[1].

  I can use Loopback to feed audio into the iOS or web version of Otter.ai on my MBP to fill in some of the gaps where Chrome isn't an option (i.e., FaceTime calls with family and friends), but it increasingly feels like a janky solution and I'd rather have something built in.

  [1] - I like having a smartwatch so as not to miss notifications so I'd need to find a good enough solution for that, plus my current hearing aid needs an additional supporting device to stream from an Android phone, so that would run up some additional costs.

• by rbinv on 5/19/21, 5:29 PM

  Wow, I did not expect the Apple Watch to be able to detect those gestures shown in the video. Impressive.

• by kstrauser on 5/19/21, 5:43 PM

  > With VoiceOver, users can explore more details about an image with descriptions, such as “Slight right profile of a person’s face with curly brown hair smiling.”

  I'm imagining some older family members, whose sight isn't so great anymore, listening to descriptions of old photos being read to them. That's stunning. Wow.

• by pkaye on 5/19/21, 5:57 PM

  I don't have an iPhone myself but do use hearing aids. I'm glad the big tech companies are paying attention to such details. There are a lot of little details of the hearing aid bluetooth experience that could be improved by all manufacturers. I just want instantaneous switching between multiple bluetooth devices.

• by owenversteeg on 5/19/21, 6:48 PM

  A few years back I tried to set up Android’s TalkBack for my 90 year old blind grandmother, but unfortunately it was impossible to use. Even as someone who’s very familiar with the Android UI (and can see what I’m doing) I found it very difficult. I’ve heard iPhones are a million times better for blind users, but is their accessibility technology good enough that I could teach my grandmother to use them?

  The problem is that she has very little tech experience, so things are confusing. Imagine being 90 and blind and feeling your way around a brand new user interface, full of acronyms and words you don’t understand. What’s a SIM or a VPN or a JPG? Then again, all she needs to do is send texts, Google things, and make calls. Taking pictures would also be nice.

  If anyone here has a similar experience helping an old blind person with tech, I’d love to hear it.

• by victor106 on 5/19/21, 7:15 PM

  i just to say Apple is one of the only companies that I know of is super serious about providing first class features to people with disabilities. Other companies do provide some of them but they are not as well thought out as Apple

• by jordanmorgan10 on 5/19/21, 5:45 PM

  That is a whole other level. Impressive - the watch stuff kinda reminds me of the rotor control in a way where you can activate system actions and swipes.

• by api on 5/19/21, 7:52 PM

  I'm impressed and also a bit disturbed by the vast and widening gulf between commercial OS UI/UX (especially Apple) and anything remotely FOSS. At this point I'd say FOSS UI/UX is at least 20 years behind Apple.

• by notatoad on 5/19/21, 6:18 PM

  i'm not hard of hearing so maybe i'm just missing something, but what's the point of the signtime service? wouldn't a text chat be a whole lot easier?

• by kingsuper20 on 5/19/21, 7:29 PM

  In an ideal world, it seems to me like everyone needs a different interface with a computer, whether it's a website or an application (remember those?).

  Waving a wand, I'd take something like a banking website (let's say Bank of America as an example) and strip out all the cruft. A text-only interface that (maybe) just looks like a simple early-version-of-Windows application. I'll grant that Amazon and eBay require the ability to put up images, Vanguard and Fidelity most certainly do not.

  What you could do then is to make them all alike, it's not like these sites are particularly different. Maybe the equivalent of an RSS feed app could run the lot.

  The thing is, a deaf or blind person could ask for the same thing just with their own particular abilities in mind.

  /oldmanrant

• by myth_drannon on 5/19/21, 5:51 PM

  Eye-Tracking Support for iPad. I hope with Apple's track record of usability it will be an improvement over the existing solutions. I used Dynavox camera bolted on Microsoft Surface and their proprietary software and it's painful. Using browser is an impossible task.

• by slver on 5/19/21, 6:41 PM

  It's really odd sometimes how much they focus on disability features, while also completely ignoring localization in entire countries.

• by zepto on 5/19/21, 6:46 PM

  “Nothing here that can’t be done on Linux, with better customization.”

  I get that there are reasons why people would want nothing to do with any of this and just objects to Apple because the desktop doesn’t ship with a tiling window manager.

  But to me this stuff illustrates why we actually need companies like Apple.

• by mrkramer on 5/19/21, 7:30 PM

  Good updates for accessibility.

• by sergiotapia on 5/19/21, 7:10 PM

  Q: Why do they call it "limb differences" instead of what I learned it a decade ago as "disabilities". Is "disabilities" considered offensive?

• by vitorfebraga on 5/19/21, 9:43 PM

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• by rado on 5/19/21, 6:27 PM

  Fix keyboard accessibility first, instead of releasing PR bullet points.

• by punnerud on 5/19/21, 7:29 PM

  Ironic; in Norway this introduction of eye tracing on iPad could be bad for those who has severe disabilities, because when it is easily accessible in normal stores you will no longer get them funded as a helping aid, and you then have to pay from your own pocket. This forward the burden on the families and dividing the society.

• by sitkack on 5/19/21, 5:34 PM

  The whole UI should be in a transparent hierarchical structure (the DOM? XML? Lisp?) and I should be able to apply any projection or operation on it. Context sensitive bold, or make click targets larger, or script things.

  The extensions that the vendor makes, anyone else should be able to make. I'd like to put a soft border around whatever element currently has focus. I'd like to configure my own tab order. I'd like click-lock, drag, unlock, drop so that stuff doesn't magically disappear during a botched drag-and-drop operation.

  The desktop UI was a nice hack-demo, but it really isn't that good, anywhere.

• by chipotle_coyote on 5/19/21, 6:24 PM

  For a moment I misread the headline here as "Apple prevents powerful software updates designed for people with disabilities," and thought, "Oh for Christ's sake, how did App Store review go off the rails this time".

• by nailer on 5/19/21, 5:41 PM

  Apple putting disability support into consumption devices is excellent. The current approach of trying to boil the ocean - by modifying the world rather than helping disabled people handle it better - is a massive waste of resources and results in a poorer world for disabled people.

• by anticristi on 5/19/21, 6:58 PM

  > These next-generation technologies showcase Apple’s belief that accessibility is a human right and advance the company’s long history of delivering industry-leading features that make Apple products customizable for all users.

  I read this more like: We saturated the laptop market. Then we saturated the smartphone market. Then we saturated the smart watch market. So how the heck are we supposed to grow revenue? So someone smart came up with the idea: Disabled people!

  I sure applaud that they eventually cared, but I don't think their PR is honest.