This is one major advantage to Apple sharing a foundation across all their devices. Vision Pro introduced eye tracking to their systems as a new input modality, and now it trickles down to their other platforms.
I am surprised CarPlay didn’t have voice control before this though.
CarPlay is rendered by the phone itself, so it's not strictly a function of how powerful the car infotainment is. You've been able to talk to Siri since the beginning of CarPlay so additional voice control is really just an accessibility thing
Some cars already have a voice control button on the wheel for their existing system which, if done correctly, is overriden by Siri+CarPlay. Which is really nice when it works.
I’m able to control carplay by just saying “Hey Siri.” Siri’s abilities tend to fluctuate based on what Apple is doing on the server, the phase of the moon and whether I remembered to sacrifice a chicken that morning, but otherwise, it seems to work fine.
CarPlay devices (car components) are essentially playing a streaming video of a hidden display generated by the phone. CarPlay also lets those devices send back touch events to trigger buttons and other interactions. Very little process is done on the vehicle.
BTW if you are plugged in to CarPlay and take a screen shot, it will include the hidden CarPlay screen.
Is this really likely to be downstream of the Vision Pro implementation? I would think that eye-tracking with specialized hardware at a fixed position very close to the eye is very different to doing it at a distance with a general purpose front facing camera.
Typically eye-trackers work by illuminating the eyes with near infrared light and using infrared cameras. This creates a higher contrast image of the pupils, etc. I assume Apple is doing this in the Vision Pro. Eye-tracking can also be done with just visible light, though. Apple has the benefit of knowing where all the user interface elements are on screen, so eye-tracking in this on the iPhone or iPad doesn't need to be high precision. Knowledge of the position of the items can help to reduce the uncertainty of what is being fixated on.
So there isn’t much more to it than getting a good resolution image of the eye from any distance, every millisecond.
Precision is the issue because we are mostly moving our eyes in about 8 directions, there’s no precision because we don’t know how to measure focusing of our eye lens with a camera yet (unless that too is just a matter of getting a picture).
Squinting would be the closest thing to physically expressing focusing. So the camera needs to know I’m looking left with my eye, followed by a squint to achieve precision. Seems stressful though.
Gonna need AI just to do noise cancelling of involuntary things your eyes do like pupil dilation, blinking.
Not the hardware side, but the software side. Implementing all the various behaviours and security models for the eye tracking and baking it into SwiftUI, means that it translates over easier once they figure out the hardware aspect. But the iPads and iPhones with FaceID have had eye tracking capabilities for a while, just not useful in UI.
I wonder what new voices will be added to VoiceOver? We blind people never, ever thought Eloquence, an old TTS engine from 20 years ago now, would ever come to iOS. And yet, here it is in iOS 17. I wouldn't be surprised to see DecTalk, or more Siri voices. More Braille features is amazing, and they even mentioned the Mac! VoiceOver for Mac is notoriously never given as much love as VoiceOver for iOS is, so most blind people still use Windows, even though they have iPhones.
I was expecting to see much better image descriptions, but they've already announced a ton of new stuff for plenty other disabilities. Having haptic music will be awesome even for me, adding another sense to the music. There are just so many new accessibility stuff, and I can't wait to see what all is really new in VoiceOver, since there's always new things not talked about in WWDC or release notes. I'm hoping that, one day, we get a tutorial for VoiceOver, like TalkBack on Android has, since there are so many commands, gestures, and settings that a new user never learns unless they learn to learn about them.
The image description stuff is already surprisingly good - I noticed when I got a photo text while driving and it described it well enough for me to know what it was.
It’s sometimes awesome, and often extremely basic. “Contact sent you a picture of a group of people at an airport”. Amazing. “Contact sent you a screenshot of a social media post”. Useless. We know iOS can select text in pictures, so Siri can clearly read it. It knows it’s SoMe, so why not give me the headline?
> It knows it’s SoMe, so why not give me the headline?
There's certainly a non-zero number of times this could go horribly wrong (I'm guessing CarPlay doesn't have any sense of who is in the car with you) and defaulting to not reading them out is the safest option (but they could definitely add a toggle for this, yeah.)
The same is true with reading out text messages. I’ve disabled it for CarPlay now after receiving a mildly raunchy text with a car full of colleagues. It’s still useful on the headphones though.
My friends that use synthetic voices prefer cleanliness of the older and familiar voices. One friend listens at about 900 WPM in skim mode and none of the more realistic voices work well at those rates.
Back in the 90s we reverse engineered / patched the classic MacInTalk to speed up playback. Our testers had it cranked so fast as they navigated the UI that to me it sounded more like musical notes than text.
Every once in a while I'll hear a blind person's phone audio while I'm out and about and it sounds like an unintelligible stream of noises, but they're interacting with it and using it and getting information from it. It's amazing, a whole other world of interaction from what I experience with my phone. I kind of want to learn how they're interacting with it.
>I'm hoping that, one day, we get a tutorial for VoiceOver
Maybe it's not feasible for you but if you're ever near an Apple Store, you could definitely call them and ask whether they have an accessibility expert you could talk to. In the Barcelona Apple Store for example, there is a blind employee who is an expert at using Apple's accessibility features on all their devices. He loves explaining his tips and tricks to anyone who needs to.
iOS 17 Image Descriptions are quite good, but audio descriptions don't seem to work on non-Pro devices, even though text descriptions are being shown on the screen and the audio menu is present and activated. Is that a bug?
Even on Pro devices, audio image descriptions stop working after a few cycles of switching between Image Magnifier and apps/home. This can be fixed by restarting the app and disabling/enabling audio image descriptions, but that breaks the use case when an iPhone is dedicated to running only Image Magnifier + audio descriptions, via remote MDM with no way for the local blind user to restart the app.
On-device iOS image descriptions could be improved if the user could help train the local image recognition by annotating photos or videos with text descriptions. For a blind person, this would enable locally-specific audio descriptions like "bedroom door", "kitchen fridge" or specific food dishes.
Are there other iOS or Android AR apps which offer audio descriptions of live video from the camera?
I wonder if this announcement had anything to do with the bombshells OpenAI and Google dropped this week. Couldn’t this have been part of WWDC next month?
As Terramex pointed out this is tied to a particular, relevant event.
It’s also pretty common for Apple to preannounce some smaller features that are too specialized to be featured in the WWDC announcements. This gives them some attention when they would be lost and buried in WWDC footnotes.
It is also probably an indication that WWDC will be full of new features and only the most impactful will be part of the keynote.
They do it every year at the same time. Also, it’s a small announcement, not a keynote or the kind of fanfare we have at WWDC or the September events. This does not seem calibrated to be effective in an advertising war with another company. All this to say, probably not.
I think it's more of "clearing the decks" for stuff that didn't make the cut for WWDC. I assume WWDC is going to be all about AI and they couldn't find a good spot to put this announcement. "Clearing the decks" isn't a very kind way to refer to this accessibility tech since Apple has always been better than almost everyone else when it comes to accessibility. I don't see this as "we don't care, just announce it early" as much as "we can't fit this in so let's announce it early".
I love accessibility features because they might be the last features developed solely with the benefit of the user in mind. So many other app/os features are designed to steal your attention or gradually nerf usefulness.
iOS 17 audio image descriptions for blind people via Image Magnifier should work on all iPhones, but do not work on iPhone SE3 and iPhone 11 Pro. Audio image descriptions do work in iPhone 12 Pro. Lidar in 12 Pro increases accuracy, but should not be mandatory. Hopefully this is a bug that can be fixed, since text descriptions were still functional on the lower-end devices.
Source: purchased devices until finding one that worked, since Apple docs indicated the feature should work on all iPhones that can run iOS 17.
Edit: audio descriptions in Magnifier are non-functional on iPad Air, working on M2 iPad Pro.
That's because the ADA has no enforcement mechanism other than lawsuits, isn't it? Our whole legal disability rights infrastructure is designed to be driven by lawsuits, and sits inert if nobody sues.
That's actually a good thing, especially if there are people specializing in bringing these lawsuits en-masse.
Over here in Europe, where there's no lawsuit culture, some laws (not necessarily accessibility-related, our legislation in that area is far weaker) are violated almost without repercussions. When the government is the only party that can bring charges and the government is complacent / ineffective, nobody actually gets charged and nothing gets done.
There's also the problem of incentives, if you can get a lot of money from a lawsuit, you have a far better incentive to sue and find a competent lawyer. You may even deliberately look for and sue violators as a moneymaking scheme, some companies in the US do this. This puts pressure on businesses to comply with the law. Even if you're piss-poor and never sue anybody, you still benefit.
If this lawsuit culture doesn't exist, the best you can do is write a report to the government and hope they actually act on it. Many people don't know how to write these, and since there's no money in it, getting a lawyer to do it for you is an expense that nobody is going to help you recoup.
The people handling these reports don't help either, they're usually 9-to-5 salaried employees who aren't judged too hard on performance, so they have far less of an incentive to actually pursue cases.
Some of them are, at least on Apple's side, but it's always for a good technical reason. Screen recognition is only available on devices that have a neural chip, things that require lidar don't work on devices that don't have lidar and so on.
Google is worse at this, Talkback multi-finger gestures used to be Pixel and Samsung exclusive for a while, even though there was no technical reason for it.
Apple has a different problem, many accessibility features aren't internationalized properly. Screen recognition still has issues on non-english systems, so do image descriptions. Voice Over (especially on Mac) didn't include voices for some of the less-popular languages until very recently, even though Vocalizer, their underlying speech engine, has supported them for years. Siri has the same problem.
Every attention thief is absolutely thrilled at the idea of tracking your eyes. Let’s all imagine the day where the YouTube free tier pauses ads when you’re not actively looking at them.
Shit. I’m turning into one of those negative downers. I’m sorry. I’ve had too much internet today.
System one is, but advertisers could always roll their own and see if they can get away with "you can only view this content if you give us permission to use your camera".
At least on iOS, I can't imagine that happening - apps are not allowed to demand you grant permissions unrelated to the actual functionality. From App Review Guidelines (5.1.1) Data Collection and Storage, (ii) Access:
> Apps must respect the user’s permission settings and not attempt to manipulate, trick, or force people to consent to unnecessary data access. For example, apps that include the ability to post photos to a social network must not also require microphone access before allowing the user to upload photos.
Lots of iOS apps today really want to mine your address book, and constantly spam you with dialogs to enable it, but they don't go as far as disabling other features until you grant them access, because they'd get rejected once someone noticed.
It's not that hard to come with ways to circumvent system restrictions, after all, advertisers are a fierce adversary and have shown many clever ways of invading users privacy in web browsers and mobile apps. In the case of eye tracking I could see a situation where the system perhaps feeds the "malicious" app in question with a hint of which widget is being currently gazed by the user. You could then just build a giant grid of invisible widgets covering the whole app window and use that to reconstruct the all the eye tracking happening inside your app.
This is not about technical restrictions and finding weird legal loopholes, Apple's guidelines don't work that way. It's the spirit that matters, not the letter.
Fortunately apps in the EU don’t have to pass though Apple’s anticompetitive review process, so developers are free to ignore that rule if they simply distribute the app via an alternative store.
Unfortunately, poor Americans cannot taste the freedom that Europeans have to be abused by developers.
Until people complain that Apple is being anti-competitive by not making vision tracking open, or allowing third-party eye-tracking controls, etc. etc.
If you look at the current things the EU has forced them to open up (app distribution and NFC payments), both of them are things that Apple was already actively monetizing.
To compare this to a non-monetized accessibility feature is a bit disingenuous.
The whole notion of ‘fairness’ is that gatekeepers should allow others to compete on even footing. That can be fulfilled by granting EITHER everybody OR nobody access to the market (but not: only yourself).
Fifteen million merits is maybe the least about the future of any Black Mirror episode. It reads best as entirely a comment on the society we already have.
A big clue is that the world in it doesn’t make a ton of internal sense and the episode makes absolutely no effort to smooth that over. The questions it raises and leaves open without even attempting an answer are on purpose. You’re supposed to go “god, bicycling to make little pellets? Just to buy useless trash? God, why? It’s so pointless,” or, “they truly look down on and are mean to the people who get demoted, even though they’re basically guaranteed to end up that way someday, when their health or good fortune run out? Just cruelty for no reason that’s highly likely to hit them some day, too? That’s insane!”
… because actually it’s about now (or, the year it came out) and the point is to get you to connect the dots and realize we’re doing the same crap and just don’t notice. It’s only “sci fi” as some sleight of hand to give you an alien’s eye view of our own actual society as a way to prompt reflection. The core story of the corruption of a “revolutionary” to serve the purposes of the system is some bog-standard media studies stuff pertaining to today, not sci fi. The reveal that they could just fucking stop all this and go outside, it’s not some alien world or a post apocalypse after all is yet another thing that’s supposed to make you go “what’s wrong with them? Oh. Right. It’s us.”[1]
Long winded way to say: we can’t “end up” at Fifteen Million Merits future-world, because it’s just our own world we’re already in.
[1] Some read the final scene as depicting yet another viewscreen, but this is such a wildly weaker reading as far as the how effective the scene is that I can’t believe it’s intended that way.
I often use them to get around bad UI/UX (like using Reduce Motion), or to make devices more useful (Color Filters (red) for using at night).
Even outside of this, even able-bodied folks can be disabled due to illness, surgery, injury, etc. So it's great to see Apple continuing to support accessibility.
The red color filter for outside when trying to preserve night vision is a great tip. Some apps have this built-in but much better to have the OS change it everywhere.
Recommend creating a Shortcut to toggle this setting.
The issue I've seen when the app itself offers a red filter is if that app calls an OS native widget like a keyboard does not get filtered. The system level accessibility feature does filter the OS widget. I would almost rather the app's setting to just enable the OS filter, but I can understand why that might not be possible.
Kinda feels like you could’ve done more of a cursory glance to see what functionality was actually being talked about before going for the “Android already does this!!” comment.
Kinda feels like you could've be more like [0] than being an ass, while totally missing what I was surprised about the lack of automagik, not of the feature itself.
Not just for outside, but also at public gatherings like concerts! I went to a concert last month and used a red color filter to record a couple short videos without being a big distraction to the audience behind me.
Dim backlight + Red color filter can make the screen almost invisible to those around you.
Thanks for the reminder. Wish I had remembered this feature during the aurora photography I was doing. I set the phone brightness to the lowest setting but the red filter would have helped even more.
I made a Shortcut that drops the white point, turns on the red filter, zeroes the audio and turns down the brightness. On wake-up it reverses these.
It’s attached to an automation for sleep and wake focus it works really well. I added an explicit run requirement for wake so that I could sleep in without getting blasted in the face with white. There’s a notification with a run button which I can wait until I’m truly up to hit.
I think you can just add it to Control Centre, no need for shortcuts.
I made an app for reading in the dark, minimising the amount of light hitting your eyeballs, but I'm still using the red color filter every night.
I don't love that solid UX gets pushed under the accessibility rug, as an option you might never find.
I don't care how cynical it sounds, user experience became user exploitation a long time ago. Big Tech have been running that gimmick at too-big-to-fail scale for the last decade or so.
Accessibility benefits everyone, but in the basics you’re right. Too many simple straightforward options are now strictly inside accessibility. At least on the Apple side.
And don’t get me started on hidden command line settings.
not OP, but macOS has a ton of options available with arcane commands. my favorites are the auto-hide dock speed setting, the third hidden window minimise animation, and the hidden system accent colours usually locked to the colourful iMacs
Yes they can, but I don't and I still hate needless animations and turn them off. The point is, why is it in "accessibility" when it should be more visible?
> Too many simple straightforward options are now strictly inside accessibility
From outside, it feels like these are the only people with the freedom to improve the user experience at all. So they have to hide their work in the Accessibility preferences.
You're getting a lot of agreement from other HN users, but I'm not sure it's fair to criticize Apple for putting these kinds of features under Accessibility.
There's nothing that inherently "locks out" people who don't have a recognized disability from exploring these features. Furthermore, most of Apple's "accessibility" features are related to Vision/Hearing/etc (and categorized as such), so I think it's reasonable to consider them accessibility features.
Clearly based on other comments here, plenty of people discover these features and find them useful.
The iPhone has a hidden accessibility setting where you can map and double and/or triple tap of the back of your phone to a handful of actions. I use this to trigger Reachability (the feature that brings the entire UI halfway down the screen so you can reach buttons at the top) because phone screens are so damn big that I can't reach the opposite top corner with my thumb even on my 13 mini without hand gymnastics. And the normal Reachability gesture is super unreliable to trigger ever since they got rid of the front Touch ID home button.
Double tap is reachability for me and triple tap is to make the display very dim so that at night at the lowest brightness setting, I can get it even lower. It resets after a while so even if I forget to switch it off my screen won’t stay dim for the next few days while I wonder why it’s so damn dark.
Perhaps I could rephrase that it's hidden within Accessibility settings, not that it's an accessibility setting that is furthermore hidden.
Most people don't go into that menu to look around for things they might want to use cause features that almost everyone could benefit from are alongside settings for people with visual and hearing impairments.
Unironically calling this feature "hidden" is why things are the way they are now. It's not hidden! You can find it if you go through the settings app! But because it isn't in your face all day every now and then people will talk about this "super secret feature" and then a PM somewhere has to make a nag feature to advertise it.
Let's say you're a developer at a big software company (not necessarily Apple, this happens everywhere) and you want to add a new optional setting.
The bar is pretty high. There are already hundreds of settings. Each one adds cost and complexity. So even if it's a good idea, the leadership might say "no".
Now let's say this same setting makes a big difference in usability for some people with disabilities. You just want to put it in accessibility settings. It won't clutter the rest of the UI.
This will happen. These features are always ushered in as ways to make someone's life easier, and often that is exactly what it does, for a time, before some product manager figures out how they can maximize profit with it.
Wouldn't a lot of the companies that build in accessibility do it from a viewpoint of gaining an even wider reach and/or a better public image?
I don't see optimizing for that as bad. If they think we'll love the product more by making it better for a given audience, especially if I'm in that audience, I'm happy. Does that mean this company now gets richer? Perhaps, and that's fine by me
I definitely get a good amount of motion sickness when using my phone while in a car so I'm super interested about the motion sickness cues and if they'll work. The dots look like they may get in the way a bit but I'm willing to take that tradeoff.
My current car motion sickness mitigation system is these glasses that have liquid in them that supposedly help your ears feel the motion of the car better (and make you look like Harry Potter)
> Vehicle Motion Cues is a new experience for iPhone and iPad that can help reduce motion sickness for passengers in moving vehicles.
This excites me so, so much! I can't really use my phone as a passenger in a car without getting motion sick after 1-2 minutes. This seems like it might be a promising thing to try.
I went on a cruise, and had significant (for me) motion sickness that only got better once I ate --- of course, I was avoiding eating because I didn't feel well, so that seems like the wrong choice.
The instant-on power and braking takes some getting used to. For the folks who have trouble mastering it, my recommendation is chill mode. It has a much softer acceleration profile, mostly eliminating the harsh starts you might be experiencing.
Chill mode is all upside in my book. There's still a ton of power when you need it, it's easier on the tires (and thus your wallet), and you get jerked around less.
Some people never really learn how to use one-pedal driving, so they end up just going back and forth between accelerating and decelerating. That'll make me motion sick in a hurry, and I bet that is fairly universal (among people prone to motion sickness in cars, that is). So in that sense, any EV or hybrid is potentially a problem, depending on the driver.
This is giving me flashbacks to the time I took an uber home from the airport in Dallas. 25 minutes of an older gentlemen (65ish) just modulating between gas pedal and brake pedal the entire time. It was awful and I wish I wasn't such a coward at the time and had told him after he dropped me off.
In the racing/track world, any time spent off the accelrator or brake is literally leaving time on the table.
The idea being; you are going at 10/10 until the exact point you know you need to go 4/10 at an apex and apply full braking. Then getting right back up to 10/10.
Similarly, I notice that i do a lot of this "sine wave" driving (IE , gas, brake, gas brake) when I'm heavily loaded with passengers or on a curvy road where I don't quite know the ratios. So I'm often not expecting to need to brake so heavily but, for safeety of course, need to.
Yea, I get it for driving on track, but not on the highway just managing space between you and the car in front.
Re: your curvy road, I would say at that point you might just be driving too fast for the load in your vehicle. When passengers are onboard, a smooth ride will beat everything 99% of the time. If I have to suddenly break for a sharp corner, then I apologize and slow down so it doesn't happen again.
I suspect most people's interaction with Prius' are Uber rides. Maybe Uber drivers just get bad habits from the platform incentives (drive fast = get more rides)
I regularly drive two family members around—one gets motion sick much faster and more frequently when hungry, while the other gets motion sick the same either way.
Yes, sort of. I don’t necessarily have to feel hungry but if I’m on an empty stomach or just haven’t eaten in a while, the odds I get motion sickness are much higher.
If I’m riding somewhere to go get dinner, I have to sit in the front passenger seat. After dinner with a full belly? Throw me in the back and I’ll be fine.
I used to get bad nausea from aggressive physic-y VR games. But I heard people claim it can be grinded through. So I did that, and they were right. I can do VR games without needed to vomit although it’s still uncomfortable.
However… I am now much more sensitive to non VR motion sickness. :|
I played games my whole life and was shocked I had near instant VR motion sickness in sim racing. Can confirm it can be grinded through, recognize the feelings and stop immediately.
Very similar experience. My instinct would be to fight the sickness and push through, but in reality you need to stop immediately and try again in a few hours. Your tolerance tends to build exponentially!
Could be, but not necessarily. Eye tracking usually means it's tracking the eyes of one or more people in a video. Gaze tracking usually requires your eyes stay pretty steady and close to the tracker.
This is how I feel about "face recognition" (it should mean recognizing whether something is a face or not), but it is common to use eye tracking this way.
Where are you getting this language point from? If I look up any company selling "eye trackers", their products are all meant to track where you're looking, e.g., https://www.tobii.com/
Accessibility settings are really a gold mine on iOS for device customization (yes, I agree, they shouldn’t be limited to accessibility).
I’m particularly interested in the motion cues and the color filters for CarPlay - I have color filters set up to enable every night as kind of a Turbo-night shift mode (deep orange-red color shift), would love to do the same for CarPlay.
I also completely forgot iOS had a magnifier built in!
Accessibility features tend to be superpowers though, and I'm glad Apple gates them behind permissions and opt-ins. We all know of applications who try to trick the user into granting them inappropriate access to the device through the Accessibility APIs. I think DropBox still begs you to grant them Accessibility access so its tendrils can do who-knows-what to your system.
It varies. Things like keyboard control or that kind of thing, absolutely, but mostly I've used it for stuff like "don't make an animated transition every time I change pages like an overcaffienated George Lucas" or "actually make night shift shift enough to be useful at night". I also use the background sounds to augment noise cancellation while taking a nap. All of those are just useful things or personal settings, not necessarily attack vectors.
Guaranteed that marketers are salivating at the idea of eye tracking on apps and website. It's an amazing feature that absolutely needs to be gatekept.
I wonder if it'll use the same architecture as visionOS; where the vision tracking events and UI affordances are processed and composited out-of-process; with the app never seeing them.
That's probably how it'll go because it's the path of least resistance. A button will already have a listener for tap, so the OS translates the vision tracking into a "tap" and triggers the relevant code. There's no point telling the app about vision tracking because apps wouldn't already have a handler for that event. And for privacy reasons, there's no need to start now.
Well, they aren't really limited to accessibility, but they are hidden there. It's sort of like a convenient excuse to get UI designers off your back if you want to ship customization.
My favorite is the "allow ANC with just one AirPod in". I have no idea why this would be an accessibility feature. If I turn on ANC, then I don't want it to be disabled just because I'm listening with one ear!
Eye Gaze devices(tablet with camera + software) cost around $20K, even if it offers 1/4 of the features this is good news for those who can't afford it.
Don't be ridiculous. Solid hardware and software combos for windows cost a small fraction of that. The convenient and decent Tobii PCEye costs like $1,250 and a very nice TMS5 mini is under $2,000. Your bullshit was off by at least an order of magnitude.
Let's be fair and compare similar products. Do you have any examples of $2000 mobile devices that support eye tracking on the OS level? The products you mention look like they're extra hardware you strap to a Windows PC. Certainly useful, but not quite as potentially life-changing as having that built into your phone.
I am excited for Vocal Cues - my main frustration with Siri is how poorly it comprehends even explicit instructions.
One thing I wish Apple would implement is some kind of gesture control. The camera can detect fine details of face movement, it would be nice if that were leveraged to track hands that aren't touching the screen.
For an example, if I have my iPhone or iPad on the desk in front of me, and a push notification that I don't need obstructs the content on the screen, I would love to be able to swipe my hand up towards the phone to dismiss it.
Eye tracking is absolutely an accessibility feature. Just because you don't need it, and it can be abused, does not mean it isn't an absolutely game changing feature for some people.
No optimism, simply facts based on the lack of APIs for accessing any of this data. Since this is just a preannouncement (APIs will come at WWDC next month), we can't tell yet, but Apple's previous system attention tracking was never available in public APIs.
It is preferable to the reflexive cynicism and nihilism that is so prevalent online. At least the supporters have put some thought into their argument.
You can say a lot of negative true things about Apple but this is just silly. There is no way Apple is going to expose that data to underlying apps in the same way they refused to do it in Vision Pro. I'd bet a good bit of money it works the same way where it's a layer on top of the app that the app can't access and from the video it looks like that's exactly how it works.
Not to underlying 3rd party apps, but for their ad structure it is a total possibility. It might not be now, but down the road this feature will be used for that and you must be certain that Apple already discussed and planned it.
They keep announcing these bombastic accessibility features while simple things like tabbing remain frustratingly broken. The macOS “allow this app to access that” dialog supports shift+tab, but not tab.
There's a lot of interesting things we can do with haptics since they're relatively cheap to put in stuff. Hopefully accessibility gets the software and applications further along soon
I'm severely hearing impaired and enjoy going to dance classes - swing, salsa, etc. If I'm standing still, I can easily tune into the beat. But once I start moving, I quickly lose it on many songs; dance studios aren't known for having large sound systems with substantial bass. I don't know that this specific setup would fix anything -- it would need some way of syncing to the instructor's iPhone that is connected via bluetooth to the studio's little portable speaker. But it's a step in the right direction.
While on the topic, I can hear music but almost never understand lyrics; at best I might catch the key chorus phrase (example: the words "born in the USA" are literally the only words I understand in that song).
A few months ago I discovered the "karaoke" feature on Apple Music, in which it displays the lyrics in time with the music. This have been game changing for me. I'm catching up on decades worth of music where I never had any idea what the lyrics are (filthy, that's what they are. So many songs about sex!). It has made exercising on the treadmill, elliptical, etc actually enjoyable.
> A few months ago I discovered the "karaoke" feature on Apple Music, in which it displays the lyrics in time with the music.
JSYK Spotify has had this for years too, its just under the "View Lyrics" button but it does highlight the sentence/word karaoke style. It used to be a "spotify app" back in that genre of the service.
That doesn't surprise me too much. I never really used Spotify or any music app much in the past. This discovery was a convergence of things - switching from Android to iPhone, a renewed exercise routine, and most importantly a new iPhone and hearing aid combo that allowed the iPhone to stream directly to my hearing aid, removing the need for bulky headphones. Phone calls are also streamed directly to hearing aid. Game changing!
I had a Deaf friend who had dual cochlear implants about 10 years ago. I was blown away to learn they had Bluetooth at the time and she could beam music directly into her brain.
That's a separate option. The option above head tracking in those settings allows for adding your facial expressions (smiling, blinking etc) as shortcuts for clicks.
My first thought upon seeing the Haptic Music feature is to wonder how long until they make compatible headphones and I can relive my high school years, walking around listening to nu-metal and hip-hop with a Panasonic Shockwave walkman.
My wife is a hospice nurse and from time to time she'll have a patient without any ability to communicate except their eyes (think ALS) - for these folks in their final days/weeks of life this will be a godsend. There are specialized eye-tracking devices, but they're expensive and good luck getting them approved by insurance in time for the folks in need near the end of their lives.
I always wonder why press releases include claims that a person said a paragraph or more of text that noone would ever say out loud, but this one actually does sound like something he'd say. In a keynote video, anyway.
Sure it means something, it’s pretty low on the PR talk scale even. Let’s see:
> We believe deeply in
"We", in this case, refers to Apple and as a company can’t believe in anything, it specifically refers to their employees.
> the transformative power of innovation
A new feature will bring forth change
> to enrich lives
In order to make someone’s life better.
So far so good, at least no synergies being leveraged for 10x buzzword transformation. Let’s see if it passes the test:
There’s a bunch of new accessibility features, that certainly fits the bill for innovation.
As anecdata, at least one of these will drastically change how I interact with my devices, so there’s the transformative power.
I will be able to use these new accessibility features to improve both the way I work and how I privately use technology, so one could argue my life is being positively enriched by this transformative power brought about by innovation.
Do they "believe deeply" in this? That is only for Tim Cook and his employees to know, but they’re one of the few companies pushing advances in accessibility past the finish line, so they might!
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 350 ms ] threadI am surprised CarPlay didn’t have voice control before this though.
BTW if you are plugged in to CarPlay and take a screen shot, it will include the hidden CarPlay screen.
Precision is the issue because we are mostly moving our eyes in about 8 directions, there’s no precision because we don’t know how to measure focusing of our eye lens with a camera yet (unless that too is just a matter of getting a picture).
Squinting would be the closest thing to physically expressing focusing. So the camera needs to know I’m looking left with my eye, followed by a squint to achieve precision. Seems stressful though.
Gonna need AI just to do noise cancelling of involuntary things your eyes do like pupil dilation, blinking.
I was expecting to see much better image descriptions, but they've already announced a ton of new stuff for plenty other disabilities. Having haptic music will be awesome even for me, adding another sense to the music. There are just so many new accessibility stuff, and I can't wait to see what all is really new in VoiceOver, since there's always new things not talked about in WWDC or release notes. I'm hoping that, one day, we get a tutorial for VoiceOver, like TalkBack on Android has, since there are so many commands, gestures, and settings that a new user never learns unless they learn to learn about them.
There's certainly a non-zero number of times this could go horribly wrong (I'm guessing CarPlay doesn't have any sense of who is in the car with you) and defaulting to not reading them out is the safest option (but they could definitely add a toggle for this, yeah.)
Maybe it's not feasible for you but if you're ever near an Apple Store, you could definitely call them and ask whether they have an accessibility expert you could talk to. In the Barcelona Apple Store for example, there is a blind employee who is an expert at using Apple's accessibility features on all their devices. He loves explaining his tips and tricks to anyone who needs to.
Even on Pro devices, audio image descriptions stop working after a few cycles of switching between Image Magnifier and apps/home. This can be fixed by restarting the app and disabling/enabling audio image descriptions, but that breaks the use case when an iPhone is dedicated to running only Image Magnifier + audio descriptions, via remote MDM with no way for the local blind user to restart the app.
On-device iOS image descriptions could be improved if the user could help train the local image recognition by annotating photos or videos with text descriptions. For a blind person, this would enable locally-specific audio descriptions like "bedroom door", "kitchen fridge" or specific food dishes.
Are there other iOS or Android AR apps which offer audio descriptions of live video from the camera?
It’s also pretty common for Apple to preannounce some smaller features that are too specialized to be featured in the WWDC announcements. This gives them some attention when they would be lost and buried in WWDC footnotes.
It is also probably an indication that WWDC will be full of new features and only the most impactful will be part of the keynote.
Hopefully accessibility features are never artificially segmented to higher priced devices.
If it requires a chip that supports specific operations, and entry tier devices have an older chip, that wouldn't be a violation.
Source: purchased devices until finding one that worked, since Apple docs indicated the feature should work on all iPhones that can run iOS 17.
Edit: audio descriptions in Magnifier are non-functional on iPad Air, working on M2 iPad Pro.
Over here in Europe, where there's no lawsuit culture, some laws (not necessarily accessibility-related, our legislation in that area is far weaker) are violated almost without repercussions. When the government is the only party that can bring charges and the government is complacent / ineffective, nobody actually gets charged and nothing gets done.
There's also the problem of incentives, if you can get a lot of money from a lawsuit, you have a far better incentive to sue and find a competent lawyer. You may even deliberately look for and sue violators as a moneymaking scheme, some companies in the US do this. This puts pressure on businesses to comply with the law. Even if you're piss-poor and never sue anybody, you still benefit.
If this lawsuit culture doesn't exist, the best you can do is write a report to the government and hope they actually act on it. Many people don't know how to write these, and since there's no money in it, getting a lawyer to do it for you is an expense that nobody is going to help you recoup.
The people handling these reports don't help either, they're usually 9-to-5 salaried employees who aren't judged too hard on performance, so they have far less of an incentive to actually pursue cases.
Google is worse at this, Talkback multi-finger gestures used to be Pixel and Samsung exclusive for a while, even though there was no technical reason for it.
Apple has a different problem, many accessibility features aren't internationalized properly. Screen recognition still has issues on non-english systems, so do image descriptions. Voice Over (especially on Mac) didn't include voices for some of the less-popular languages until very recently, even though Vocalizer, their underlying speech engine, has supported them for years. Siri has the same problem.
Shit. I’m turning into one of those negative downers. I’m sorry. I’ve had too much internet today.
> Apps must respect the user’s permission settings and not attempt to manipulate, trick, or force people to consent to unnecessary data access. For example, apps that include the ability to post photos to a social network must not also require microphone access before allowing the user to upload photos.
Lots of iOS apps today really want to mine your address book, and constantly spam you with dialogs to enable it, but they don't go as far as disabling other features until you grant them access, because they'd get rejected once someone noticed.
Unfortunately, poor Americans cannot taste the freedom that Europeans have to be abused by developers.
To compare this to a non-monetized accessibility feature is a bit disingenuous.
The whole notion of ‘fairness’ is that gatekeepers should allow others to compete on even footing. That can be fulfilled by granting EITHER everybody OR nobody access to the market (but not: only yourself).
A big clue is that the world in it doesn’t make a ton of internal sense and the episode makes absolutely no effort to smooth that over. The questions it raises and leaves open without even attempting an answer are on purpose. You’re supposed to go “god, bicycling to make little pellets? Just to buy useless trash? God, why? It’s so pointless,” or, “they truly look down on and are mean to the people who get demoted, even though they’re basically guaranteed to end up that way someday, when their health or good fortune run out? Just cruelty for no reason that’s highly likely to hit them some day, too? That’s insane!”
… because actually it’s about now (or, the year it came out) and the point is to get you to connect the dots and realize we’re doing the same crap and just don’t notice. It’s only “sci fi” as some sleight of hand to give you an alien’s eye view of our own actual society as a way to prompt reflection. The core story of the corruption of a “revolutionary” to serve the purposes of the system is some bog-standard media studies stuff pertaining to today, not sci fi. The reveal that they could just fucking stop all this and go outside, it’s not some alien world or a post apocalypse after all is yet another thing that’s supposed to make you go “what’s wrong with them? Oh. Right. It’s us.”[1]
Long winded way to say: we can’t “end up” at Fifteen Million Merits future-world, because it’s just our own world we’re already in.
[1] Some read the final scene as depicting yet another viewscreen, but this is such a wildly weaker reading as far as the how effective the scene is that I can’t believe it’s intended that way.
Even outside of this, even able-bodied folks can be disabled due to illness, surgery, injury, etc. So it's great to see Apple continuing to support accessibility.
Recommend creating a Shortcut to toggle this setting.
Huh?
It's not built-in?
Android (or at least Moto) has it for years, auto enable on the schedule or the sunrise/sunset.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40371449
Dim backlight + Red color filter can make the screen almost invisible to those around you.
It’s attached to an automation for sleep and wake focus it works really well. I added an explicit run requirement for wake so that I could sleep in without getting blasted in the face with white. There’s a notification with a run button which I can wait until I’m truly up to hit.
https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/4bcfd8fc02074316aaae3503d07...
The app is overall darker and more "strict" with how it handles content (esp. images) though: https://untested.sonnet.io/Heart+of+Dorkness and midnight.sonnet.io
Overall, reduced the number of photons is a fun metric to play with when building something/messing with prototypes.
I don't care how cynical it sounds, user experience became user exploitation a long time ago. Big Tech have been running that gimmick at too-big-to-fail scale for the last decade or so.
And don’t get me started on hidden command line settings.
<cough> Reduce Motion. Is it an accessibility feature or does it just get rid of an annoyance and is good for everyone?
Yes--some people can become ill with certain types of motion on a screen [1].
[1]: https://www.a11yproject.com/posts/understanding-vestibular-d...
Personally I forgot about it on my latest phone because I had a fresh prescription for my glasses and didn't need to enlarge the font at the moment :)
From outside, it feels like these are the only people with the freedom to improve the user experience at all. So they have to hide their work in the Accessibility preferences.
There's nothing that inherently "locks out" people who don't have a recognized disability from exploring these features. Furthermore, most of Apple's "accessibility" features are related to Vision/Hearing/etc (and categorized as such), so I think it's reasonable to consider them accessibility features.
Clearly based on other comments here, plenty of people discover these features and find them useful.
I'm glad the configuration is there, but it's hard to discover, so in and of itself it isn't accessible to find.
This isn’t “hidden”. It was even called out and demonstrated in the iOS 14 keynote.
Most people don't go into that menu to look around for things they might want to use cause features that almost everyone could benefit from are alongside settings for people with visual and hearing impairments.
The bar is pretty high. There are already hundreds of settings. Each one adds cost and complexity. So even if it's a good idea, the leadership might say "no".
Now let's say this same setting makes a big difference in usability for some people with disabilities. You just want to put it in accessibility settings. It won't clutter the rest of the UI.
You just turned your "no" into a "yes".
Growth at all costs, I guess.
I don't see optimizing for that as bad. If they think we'll love the product more by making it better for a given audience, especially if I'm in that audience, I'm happy. Does that mean this company now gets richer? Perhaps, and that's fine by me
This excites me so, so much! I can't really use my phone as a passenger in a car without getting motion sick after 1-2 minutes. This seems like it might be a promising thing to try.
I don't sit in enough EVs to tell if they're the same.
In the racing/track world, any time spent off the accelrator or brake is literally leaving time on the table.
The idea being; you are going at 10/10 until the exact point you know you need to go 4/10 at an apex and apply full braking. Then getting right back up to 10/10.
Similarly, I notice that i do a lot of this "sine wave" driving (IE , gas, brake, gas brake) when I'm heavily loaded with passengers or on a curvy road where I don't quite know the ratios. So I'm often not expecting to need to brake so heavily but, for safeety of course, need to.
Re: your curvy road, I would say at that point you might just be driving too fast for the load in your vehicle. When passengers are onboard, a smooth ride will beat everything 99% of the time. If I have to suddenly break for a sharp corner, then I apologize and slow down so it doesn't happen again.
Does make me wonder what the difference is there.
If I’m riding somewhere to go get dinner, I have to sit in the front passenger seat. After dinner with a full belly? Throw me in the back and I’ll be fine.
Unsure if it actually works though, my personal test results are mixed.
I used to get bad nausea from aggressive physic-y VR games. But I heard people claim it can be grinded through. So I did that, and they were right. I can do VR games without needed to vomit although it’s still uncomfortable.
However… I am now much more sensitive to non VR motion sickness. :|
I’m particularly interested in the motion cues and the color filters for CarPlay - I have color filters set up to enable every night as kind of a Turbo-night shift mode (deep orange-red color shift), would love to do the same for CarPlay.
I also completely forgot iOS had a magnifier built in!
With great power comes great responsibility.
One thing I wish Apple would implement is some kind of gesture control. The camera can detect fine details of face movement, it would be nice if that were leveraged to track hands that aren't touching the screen.
For an example, if I have my iPhone or iPad on the desk in front of me, and a push notification that I don't need obstructs the content on the screen, I would love to be able to swipe my hand up towards the phone to dismiss it.
Just because it's not a game changing feature for some people, doesn't mean its primary function isn't advertising.
Microsoft added a similar feature to Windows about seven years ago.
https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/navigate-your-mac-u... - Full Keyboard Access (accessibility feature, goes beyond just tabbing between elements)
It's annoying that tabbing between UI elements is off by default on macOS. It's one of the first things I turn on with a new mac.
While on the topic, I can hear music but almost never understand lyrics; at best I might catch the key chorus phrase (example: the words "born in the USA" are literally the only words I understand in that song).
A few months ago I discovered the "karaoke" feature on Apple Music, in which it displays the lyrics in time with the music. This have been game changing for me. I'm catching up on decades worth of music where I never had any idea what the lyrics are (filthy, that's what they are. So many songs about sex!). It has made exercising on the treadmill, elliptical, etc actually enjoyable.
JSYK Spotify has had this for years too, its just under the "View Lyrics" button but it does highlight the sentence/word karaoke style. It used to be a "spotify app" back in that genre of the service.
System preferences -> Accessibility -> Pointer Control
Then turn on the "Head pointer" option.
https://github.com/google/project-gameface
Does this line actually mean anything? Press releases are so weird.
> We believe deeply in
"We", in this case, refers to Apple and as a company can’t believe in anything, it specifically refers to their employees.
> the transformative power of innovation
A new feature will bring forth change
> to enrich lives
In order to make someone’s life better.
So far so good, at least no synergies being leveraged for 10x buzzword transformation. Let’s see if it passes the test: There’s a bunch of new accessibility features, that certainly fits the bill for innovation. As anecdata, at least one of these will drastically change how I interact with my devices, so there’s the transformative power. I will be able to use these new accessibility features to improve both the way I work and how I privately use technology, so one could argue my life is being positively enriched by this transformative power brought about by innovation. Do they "believe deeply" in this? That is only for Tim Cook and his employees to know, but they’re one of the few companies pushing advances in accessibility past the finish line, so they might!