Apple Announces New iOS 19 and macOS 16 Accessibility Features Ahead of WWDC

Tuesday May 13, 2025 5:51 am PDT by Joe Rossignol

Apple today previewed a wide range of new accessibility features coming later this year on the iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, and Apple Vision Pro. The announcement comes two days ahead of Global Accessibility Awareness Day.

iOS 19 Accessibility Feature
These features are expected to debut across iOS 19, iPadOS 19, macOS 16, watchOS 12, and visionOS 3, which will be unveiled during the WWDC 2025 keynote on Monday, June 9. Following months of beta testing, the software updates should be released in September, bringing the new accessibility features to the masses.

Accessibility Reader

Some of the key new features:

Accessibility Nutrition Labels in the App Store, which will highlight accessibility features within apps and games.
Apple is expanding its Magnifier app to the Mac, allowing users to connect an iPhone or USB camera to zoom in and read text on objects around them.
Vehicle Motion Cues are expanding to the Mac, to reduce motion sickness in a vehicle.
A new system-wide Accessibility Reader tool on the iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Vision Pro will make text easier to read for users with low vision or dyslexia. The feature will give users new ways to customize text and focus on content they want to read, with extensive options for font, color, and spacing.
Live Captions are coming to the Apple Watch, allowing users to read a transcription of what their iPhone hears on their wrist.
An enhanced Zoom feature on the Apple Vision Pro will allow users to magnify everything in view, including their surroundings, using the device's main camera.
Braille Access will turn the iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Vision Pro into a full-featured braille note taker.
Personal Voice will become faster and easier to use, thanks to advancements in on-device machine learning and artificial intelligence. Apple says the feature will be able to create a smoother, more natural-sounding replication of your voice in less than a minute, using only 10 recorded phrases.
CarPlay will support the Large Text option, and Sound Recognition will be able to identify a crying baby inside a vehicle.

Magnifier on the Mac

More details about these features and many others can be found in Apple's press release.

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Tag: Accessibility

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Top Rated Comments

tadasZ

20 months ago

"coming later this year" from apple is "coming later year"

Score: 11 Votes (Like | Disagree)

ATLAS-2

20 months ago

Coming in iOS 19
Coming in iOS ~~19.5~~
Coming in iOS 20

Score: 8 Votes (Like | Disagree)

dullydude

20 months ago

* An enhanced Zoom feature on the Apple Vision Pro will allow users to magnify everything in view, including their surroundings, using the device's main camera.

Now THAT is what I'm talking about!

Score: 8 Votes (Like | Disagree)

m1mini

20 months ago

Personal voice could be improved. My mom has hypopharyngeal cancer and had her larynx removed so she cannot talk. So I purchased an ElevenLabs subscription and replicated her voice from her past recordings. I found an api calling ios shortcut that lets you type into a textbox and read it in a selected voice (which for me is my moms) and I set that up on my moms 15pm.

If apple can replicate the text box thing + let us use any audio clips then it will be golden

Score: 6 Votes (Like | Disagree)

Jay-Jacob

20 months ago

* Live Captions adds support to include English (India, Australia, UK, Singapore), Mandarin Chinese (Mainland China), Cantonese (Mainland China, Hong Kong), Spanish (Latin America, Spain), French (France, Canada), Japanese, German (Germany), and Korean.

Finally!! UK English live captions added! I been waiting for this ages. I had to switch all my devices to US English and it kinda annoying cos it auto correct my UK English to US English and some words in settings like cellular data instead of mobile data in UK.

Score: 4 Votes (Like | Disagree)