Global Accessibility Awareness Day Accessibility matters to everyone. If you think it doesn’t: it will. Apple builds in some pretty good tools, and they’re getting better. Here’s why it’s important.
As we write, it is Global Accessibility Awareness Day. Apple’s annual developer conference is looming: WWDC25 is in a few weeks. (The Register is not one of the company’s favorite publications, and this vulture won’t be there.) In the run-up to the event, the Cupertino massive has released some information about the “powerful accessibility features coming later this year.”
These include some tools that sound genuinely useful to this (so far, mostly, not very disabled) vulture. Accessibility “nutrition labels” mean that products in the App Store will have a simple all-in-one-place screen telling prospective purchasers if the apps work with Apple’s built-in VoiceOver screen reader, Voice Control speech-driven UI, screen motion reduction and contrast enhancement, captions, and more. That’s an entirely non-technical enhancement that sounds well worth having.
Among the other new stuff, the Magnifier tool from the iPad is coming to Macs. Since Macbooks don’t have a camera on the back that you can point at things and still see the screen, you can use an iPhone for that. You can do this even if you’re already in a call using the webcam, which sounds handier. And the Mac Magnifier can replace the fonts in the document it’s showing to improve readability, on the fly. There’s also a new system-wide reader mode called Accessibility Reader – as a frequent user of the Readability extension for Firefox, that sounds good to us.
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You’ll need an external Braille display to use it, but there’s improved Braille support, including Nemeth Braille for mathematics and scientific material. If you’re rich enough to have both an iPhone, an Apple Watch, and Apple or Beats Bluetooth headphones, they can work together: the watch’s microphone records sound, the phone takes that and can subtitle it with live captions, and the headphones can work as hearing aids. The Vision Pro VR headset lets users zoom and magnify what they’re looking at. Laptop users who get motion sickness can use Vehicle Motion Cues, which superimpose some moving dots on the screen you’re looking at to help your eyes match what you inner ears are telling you.
There’s quite a lot of good stuff in there, and the full release is well worth a read. You may think to yourself that this sounds all very nice, but you don’t need any of it. If so, we have a hint for you.
Long ago, this vulture attended a live show presented by comedian and writer — as The Reg once described him — Richard Herring. (Long ago, also a Reg correspondent.) Herring asked several of his guests with physical disabilities an interesting question: given that able-bodied folks have many, often pejorative, epithets for disabled people — what do people with disabilities call those without them? After a pause, one guest answered:
Because unless we die first, the process of aging will disable all of us at some point: sight, hearing, mobility, strength. Eventually, all us lose some or all of them.
Apple has made announcements like this quite a few time. Here’s the 2024 version, for instance, and 2022’s one, and the 2021 version.
This is a good thing. Apple has long taken this seriously, and it is important. That’s why Stevie Wonder thanked the dying Steve Jobs:
Apple doesn’t get everything right, and there are significant holes, as Reg contributor Colin Hughes has been pointing out since 2016. He was still highlighting problems with Voice Control in 2023. As it happens, a few months earlier, this vulture had crashed off his bicycle and smashed his right arm into enough fragments it needed 36 plates and screws to reassemble it. The Reg sent him an M1 MacBook Air so he could dictate his copy, and we encountered some of the issues Hughes talks about. On the older Intel-powered Macs, Apple’s dictation feature sent compressed sound to Apple servers for processing; on the newer Apple Silicon kit, it all happens locally. Which is impressive, but there’s always a cost, and it’s that the new version can’t easily learn new words. When this British-accented hack says “Linux” – as in, linn-ucks – the Mac transcribes “Lennox.” After some cursing, bits of which the Mac faithfully and amusingly transcribed, we worked out that we had to say lie-nucks to get it to enter “Linux” in the text. More words which had to be deleted ensued.
Improvement often feels like it’s “two steps forward, one step backwards.” Hughes continued to make suggestions last year, and anticipating this year’s announcement, he had some prognostications. He told us:
He’s right. What Apple does is laudable. It’s not perfect — far from it — but for now, it’s the best in the business. The constrast with the very different situation on Windows is striking, and both of them are a great deal better than the FOSS desk’s primary focus: Linux. There, the situation is abysmal. Which is what we plan to discuss next. ®
