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by dervjd 1895 days ago
Siri isn't the same thing as Voice Over/Voice Control! [0]

Apple has been frequently recognized for their efforts to make their products accessible - including by the National Federation of the Blind (NFB) [1]. Not to come off as a shill, but their contributions in the area of accessibility are worth praising.

iOS was the first mobile OS to include accessibility features. Apparently they're now using the LiDAR scanner on the iPhone 12 Pro to power a "people detection" feature for people with sight impairments.[2]

Here's a few of Apple's marketing videos on their accessibility features that are kind of neat:

A blind drummer who uses an iPhone with a black screen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHAO_kj0qcA

Accessibility: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XB4cjbYywqg

Voice Control: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqoXFCCTfm4

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[0] https://support.apple.com/accessibility/mac

[1] https://www.afb.org/aw/16/6/15452

[2] https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/people-detection-iph4...

1 comments

I've used Voice Over to some extent also (once again, this isn't an exhaustive survey by any means). It does appear to be oriented to people with motor issues more than the blind.

As I've said a couple of times here (mea culpa), my gut feeling is that the philosophy is wrong. By building verbal control systems on top of (over-) visually dense user interfaces, you have to run just to stay in place.

It could be that the answer is an entirely different audio UI for computer management and then the replacement of standard applications with ones that are suitable for audio control (with perhaps a few buttons). Perhaps somebody has made an email app for blind people, but I haven't run into it yet. It certainly wouldn't be Outlook with a robot reading the screen to you. Probably the only way I could understand this at all is to attempt to produce one, writing software has the side effect of forcing you to fully understand a problem.