Apple today is honoring International Day of Persons with Disabilities with a re-launch of its Accessibility site and a new collection of tutorial videos highlighting the accessibility features of its software.
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As spotted by iMore, the redesigned site is made up of four broad sections that showcase many of the accessibility features across Apple's product range, with new categories covering vision, mobility, hearing, and cognitive features.
The vision section covers several iOS features such as the Magnifier, Zoom, Larger Text, Voiceover + Braille, and Spoken Content, while the hearing covers using Sound Recognition, Headphone Accommodations, Sensory Alerts, Live Listen, and many more useful tools.
Meanwhile, over on the Apple Support YouTube channel, Apple has added new how-to videos to its Accessibility playlist on using the Magnifier, the BackTap feature, and specific Voice Control usage scenarios, including how to take a selfie.
Apple's Accessibility website and the Apple Support channel have more details.
Apple's Accessibility Engineering Lead for iOS Chris Fleizach and Senior Director of Global Accessibility, Policy, and Initiatives Sarah Herrlinger also did an interview with TechCrunch's Matthew Panzarino to discuss the newest accessibility technology from Apple.
Top Rated Comments
1. Rent a better speech recognition engine from Nuance.
2. Cover all other languages, not just 3 variants of English.
3. Add a user vocabulary feature for all the languages they support.
4. Implement an easy language switching for text dictation, independently from Voice Control language.
5. Make it work in all text fields, including in Windows virtual machines.
6. Test the feature so it does not feel half-baked.
That would be a true, not marketing, honouring of the International Day of Persons with Disabilities.
Agree with you 100 per cent on all your points. Voice Control has been such a half baked disappointment thus far. Apple has practically ignored it since launch. macOS Big Sur and iOS 14 brought few improvements worth mentioning. If you are in employment and disabled and rely on speech recognition on a Mac to get things done, long emails, documents etc you can forget Voice Control. It’s little more than a patronising toy. I have to run Parallels on my MacBook and use Nuance Dragon to be productive.As an Apple fan I feel let down. It doesn’t need to be like this if Apple showed Voice Control some love and investment and recognised the critical importance high quality speech recognition is to some disabled people who don’t have a plan B for communicating with the online world. Hopefully, someone with influence within Apple is reading the important points you make and we will see some significant improvements to Voice Control in 2021.I wish Apple paid more attention to Voice Control:
1. Rent a better speech recognition engine from Nuance.
2. Cover all other languages, not just 3 variants of English.
3. Add a user vocabulary feature for all the languages they support.
4. Implement an easy language switching for text dictation, independently from Voice Control language.
5. Make it work in all text fields, including in Windows virtual machines.
6. Test the feature so it does not feel half-baked.
That would be a true, not marketing, honouring of the International Day of Persons with Disabilities.
I would add word training to your list. I have jargon and friends with foreign names and Voice Control fails to recognise them time after time.
4) Dictation in Voice Control needs to become more accurate and productive for long form dictation. Needs to go way beyond dictating a short message like “Happy birthday” or “I will be home in 5 minutes”.
Hopefully, on this the International Day of Disabled People someone at Apple is listening