Apple announced today its next steps in improving accessibility in its products. A host of improvements, features, and options are coming that are designed to help disabled people get the most out of their Apple devices.
In a press release, Apple revealed that substantial new features are coming to iPhone, Apple Watch, and iPad. On iPhones, Apple is updating the Made For iPhone program by adding support for new bi-directional hearing aids. These new aids have microphones that’ll allow wearers to have hands-free phone and FaceTime calls. In addition, Apple is also adding support for audiograms (or hearing tests) that will let users import data from their tests to customize audio.
Apple is also adding a background sounds feature, which is designed to help people stay focused by providing consistent noise like white noise, or ocean, rain, or stream sounds. It’s meant to mask environmental sounds, but Apple says that the feature will integrate with system or other audio played on your device.
On Apple Watch, Apple is adding the AssistiveTouch feature that is designed to allow for no-touch navigation of the watch display. Considering that Apple Watches have, until now, relied on touch and voice commands, this is a pretty big feature. In essence, it lets people who may have upper-limb mobility differences to use hand gestures on the hand wearing the watch to move a cursor around its screen. Navigational features are coming to iPad, too, with support for eye tracking on the way. This will allow for users to navigate an iPad screen by moving a cursor with eye gestures that are picked up by the iPad’s camera.
Finally, enhanced VoiceOver support is coming to photos on Apple devices. While VoiceOver has already supported reading out descriptions of images, Apple will soon add capabilities to explore more information about what’s in photographs. For example, for an image of a receipt, the feature will read out what’s on the receipt as if it’s a spreadsheet table.
These are all fantastic features to help improve usability by disabled and neurodivergent folks, and the technology used to power these additions will likely improve many other parts of the Apple user experience down the line. Apple will launch these features later this year.
