(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).
“Disability is not just a health problem. It is a
complex phenomenon, reflecting the interaction between
features of a person’s body and features of the society
in which he or she lives.”
–World Health Organization
iPhone’s accessibility features are great for everybody. I use them all the time, e.g.
- “Display Curtain” switches off only the display while the app is still running. Great for people who do not need the screen for whatever reason: I use this for video-conferencing software. Everybody still can see me, but my display is off, reducing heat and battery usage.
- Display grayscale: I used this in the past to successfully reduce time spent on my phone.
- Voice control: Many do not even categorize that under “Accessibility” anymore
I did try this with iOS built-in TTS but found it was worth the effort to find the audiobook when possible.
Surely... it's a requirement to use a watch while one-handed anyway? I'm not familiar with the Apple Watch but I am not sure how you would use a watch with two hands anyway? Can someone explain?
I also wear a watch, but almost every car has a built-in clock in the dashboard.
So do mine, but they always show the wrong time.
Is this really true, or can you just read faster than most people talk?
I have trouble focusing on speech, so i often end up responding with "what?" then a few seconds later, it makes sense and i can respond. Writing is easy to injest at the rate your brain wants it.
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.
Many animals will make alarm calls [0] when they sense a predator, sometimes in multi-species groups. A few animals have alarm calls specific to different types of predator such as leopards, snakes and eagles [0]. In my own garden, I can often tell when a cat has entered by the alarm calls emitted by blackbirds and sometimes even squirrels.
So I'm not sure about this quiet jungle thing.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alarm_signal#Vervet_monkeys
Apple has a great record for sound quality, but not so much for configurability. I'm guessing that I'd be a candidate for their "dark noise" setting, but worry somewhat about their frequency selections. I'd rather have an equalizer interface for the noise options.
I wonder if these sounds will be available as part of the bedtime application (thereby sherlocking most existing applications) as that's by far my biggest requirement for covering sounds, the combination of insomnia and tinnitus makes it rather hard to fall asleep without some sort of rain sound, but short or glitchy rain loops create extremely recognisable patterns my brain latches on to have something to do, which keeps me from sleeping.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/03/18/7027840...
That sounds like it could point to some form of undiagnosed (possibly mild) sensory processing issues—which are exactly the kind of neurodiversity they are likely referring to.
The watch gestures seem useful whenever you have a handful of groceries and need to answer a call.
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.
I'm assuming you are doing iOS->macOS(w/loopback)->Otter.ai web right? Or can you have loopback feed into iOS and then use Mobile Safari+Otter.ai? I currently use a similar setup with Loopback and otter.ai to transcribe YouTube live videos and then do manual touch up before release. I never expected that other people were using Loopback+Otter.ai, I figured I was a fringe/edge case, but after some googling it looks like it's far from an obscure solution.
Work is a Windows laptop; I could (and do, on my personal Windows desktop) use VoiceMeeter to accomplish the same general approach as described above. But rather than have my security team at work asking me annoying questions, it's easier to run Otter on my iPad and use a TRS-to-TRRS patch cable (I use the Movo CFP-1 from Amazon) to feed that into my iPad... plus using my iPad to display the captions frees up my displays for meeting-related things.
In pre-pandemic times I would also use it for some meetings at work, and meetups.
I think Otter has a fairly significant user base of people using it for accessibility and not just meeting notes, and is seemingly aware of it because they've added features geared to that use case, like the full screen text option with adjustable font sizes.
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.
Check out the older videos of Tommy Edison on youtube (https://www.youtube.com/c/TommyEdisonXP). He's been blind since birth and put out a few videos many years ago on how he uses an iPhone.
I'm afraid I don't, but you might find this helpful: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrUMYePxzfM
Why can Microsoft and Google offer excellent localization virtually everywhere, and Apple can't? Apple too poor, can't hire enough people? No. So what is it?
2) I'm genuinely curious which countries you perceive as having been "ignored" -- I find 39 different .lproj folders in the /System/Library/CoreServices/Resources folder. (Of course that's on macOS and not the iPhone.)
I wish this feature would be adopted by many other manufacturers. And that generally, the bluetooth pairing was faster.
I assume this is simply being more specific.
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.
What you get is a UI that is average-bad for everyone.
I.e., every Linux UI ever. I say that as someone who has used Linux exclusively for ~10 years, for all of the time that I have had my own computer.
There are a few UI editing features like high contrast and dynamic type, but not many because of how hard it is to keep the UI usable and allow those changes.
But desktop Linux with GNOME 1.x and 2.x were actually pretty consistent any enjoyable to use. It was still different enough from the early unpolished OSX releases, but had its own strengths and some nice touches. OSX 10.0 was arguably a regression from NeXT and OpenStep by then seemed pretty close to NeXTStep in terms of user experience.
Ironically as GNOME openly pursued a more Apple-like approach of reduced configuration and “smart defaults”, OSX just seemed to pull ahead. They couldn’t out-Apple Apple and yet GNOME sucked up so many resources and default installs from corporate Linux that other environments couldn’t really compete.
I probably also just got too old to unironically run Enlightenment.
This is an acknowledgment that sign is a distinct language and, the same way that Apple Stores are localized in different countries, this localizes the Apple Store experience for DHH folks
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.
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.
Apple’s been advocating for accessibility for decades; this isn’t new.
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.
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.
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