Apple on Wednesday announced several new accessibility features coming to the iPhone and iPad. The company said the features are “coming later this year,” likely indicating they’re part of iOS 18 and iPadOS 18, which are expected to be previewed during the company’s keynote. Apple Worldwide Developers Conference on June 10.
“Every year we innovate in accessibility,” said Sarah Herrlinger, senior director of global accessibility policies and initiatives at Apple, in a press release. “These new features will impact the lives of a wide range of users, providing new ways to communicate, control their devices and move around the world. »
Here is a summary of upcoming features for the iPhone and/or iPad.
- Eye tracking: Gives the user the ability to navigate the iPhone or iPad using only their eyes. It uses the front camera and on-device machine learning to keep the data on the iPhone or iPad and not share it with Apple.
- Musical haptics: The iPhone’s Taptic Engine plays refined taps, textures and vibrations that accompany the music being played. An API will be available for developers.
- Voice shortcuts: “Custom utterances” can be used with Siri for interface shortcuts.
- Listen to atypical speeches: An enhanced speech recognition feature that uses on-device machine learning to recognize a user’s speech patterns. It is designed for users suffering from pathologies affecting speech.
- Vehicle movement cues: For people who read their device in a car, this feature is designed to reduce motion sickness. Dots appear on the screen and move with the vehicle to help reduce sensory conflict, which causes motion sickness.
Upcoming CarPlay updates
CarPlay also benefits from new features:
- Voice command: Navigate the CarPlay user interface with voice commands.
- Sound recognition: Horn and siren alerts for deaf or hard of hearing drivers.
- Color filters: For colorblind drivers on the CarPlay interface, which also includes bold and large text.
CarPlay will benefit from a new feature that provides a visual cue when a siren or horn is heard.
Apple
New accessibility features in visionOS
The Apple Vision Pro also benefits from new accessibility features:
- Live subtitles: A system-wide feature that displays captions of spoken words in real time.
- Expanded support for Made for iPhone: More hearing aids and cochlear auditory processors are added.
- Reduce transparency, Intelligent reversalAnd Dim flashing light: Visual adjustments to make using the Vision Pro more accessible.
Updates to current accessibility features
Apple also announced that these current features will receive the following updates (from Apple’s press release):
- For blind or visually impaired users, Voice off will include new voices, a flexible Voice Rotor, custom volume control, and the ability to customize VoiceOver keyboard shortcuts on Mac.
- Magnifying glass will offer a new Reader mode and the ability to easily launch Discover mode with the Action button.
- Braille users will benefit from a new way to get started and stay Braille screen input for faster text control and editing; Availability of Japanese language for braille screen input; support for multi-line braille with Block of points; and the ability to choose different input and output tables.
- For visually impaired users, Hover typing displays larger text when typing in a text field, as well as in the user’s preferred font and color.
- For users at risk of losing the ability to speak, Personal voice will be available in Mandarin Chinese. Users who have difficulty speaking or reading full sentences will be able to create a personal voice using shortened sentences.
- For non-speaking users, Live speech will include categories and concurrent compatibility with Live subtitles.
- For users with physical disabilities, Virtual pad for AssistiveTouch allows users to control their device using a small region of the screen as a resizable trackpad.
- Switch control will include the ability to use iPhone and iPad cameras to recognize finger gestures like switches.
- Voice command will offer support for custom vocabularies and complex words.
Apple is expected to release iOS 18, iPadOS 18, macOS 15, and a major visionOS update throughout fall 2024. The new operating systems will be previewed at WWDC during the keynote June 10.
