Ahead of WWDC, Apple Invites Some Developers to Attend Virtual Accessibility Session

Apple is inviting some developers to a special Accessibility session designed to teach them how iOS apps can take advantage of accessibility features built into the operating system, according to an email shared by developer Steve Troughton-Smith.

appleaccessibilitywebinar
The event, set to be held on April 23, will be an online session that takes place live, with developers able to ask questions and sign up for individual consultations. This is the first time Apple has held an online event where developers are able to interact with engineers.

It appears that Apple may be using the session as a test run for WWDC, which is set to be a digital-only event this year. Apple plans to offer an online keynote and online sessions, which will likely be similar to the Accessibility session.

Popular Stories

Apple Announces Special Event in New York Feature 1

Apple Reportedly Plans to Unveil at Least Five New Products Next Week

Sunday February 22, 2026 9:48 am PST by
In his Power On newsletter today, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman said Apple will have a three-day stretch of product announcements from Monday, March 2 through Wednesday, March 4. In total, he expects Apple to introduce "at least five products." Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more videos. A week ago, Apple invited selected journalists and content creators to an "Apple Experience" in...
iOS 26

iOS 26.3.1 Update for iPhones Coming Soon as 'Apple Experience' Nears

Sunday February 22, 2026 5:29 pm PST by
Apple's software engineers are testing iOS 26.3.1, according to the MacRumors visitor logs, which have been a reliable indicator of upcoming iOS versions. iOS 26.3.1 should be a minor update that fixes bugs and/or security vulnerabilities, and it will likely be released within the next two weeks. Last month, Apple released iOS 26.2.1 with bug fixes and support for the second-generation...
tim cook data privacy day

Tim Cook Warned by CIA That China Could Move on Taiwan by 2027

Tuesday February 24, 2026 4:03 am PST by
Apple CEO Tim Cook was among a handful of top tech executives who attended a classified CIA briefing warning that China could attack Taiwan by 2027, according to a sweeping investigative report by The New York Times ($). The previously unreported briefing was apparently held in a secure room in Silicon Valley in July 2023. The meeting is said to have been arranged at the request of the...

Top Rated Comments

76 months ago
It appears that Apple is trying to score political points by moving settings from application preferences and burying them in Accessibility on both iOS and MacOS, in order to inflate the number of settings in Accessibility. Apple wants to say "Look at us, we have this Accessibility thing with all these settings" when many of those settings should be located in more appropriate places. Examples:

On a Mac laptop, you go to System Preferences > Mouse and you can change scrolling speed. If you go to System Preferences > Trackpad, there is no scrolling speed. Instead, it is buried somewhere in Accessibility preferences.

In System Preferences > Mouse, there is no option to adjust pointer size. Instead, that setting is buried somewhere in Accessibility preferences.

To turn off spring loaded folders in the Finder, you don't go to Finder Preferences. Instead, that setting is buried somewhere in Accessibility preferences.

On iPhone and iPad if you go to Settings >Display & Brightness, there is no setting to control auto brightness. Instead, you have to go to Accessibility.

On iPhones and iPads that have Touch ID, you can configure whether you can wake and unlock the device without having to first press and release home button and then put your finger on the Touch ID. You can just press the home button to wake the device and activate Touch ID without having to release the button. But instead of having this option in Settings > Touch ID, it is buried in Accessibility.

Moving settings from the application and burying them in Accessibility is not helpful at all. It just causes more irritation because people now have to look in two places to find things: the application preferences and Accessibility. Now the Accessibility preferences have become as convoluted as iTunes and this helps no one.
Score: 1 Votes (Like | Disagree)
76 months ago
If this was a trial for WWDC then I'm glad they did it. Was meant to start at 9am...

"We apologize for the inconvenience, but there is a worldwide Webex outage that’s preventing us from starting today’s event on time. We are delaying the event to 10:00 AM BST while we work on resolving the issue."
Score: 1 Votes (Like | Disagree)