[RobMurray]

I know plenty of blind people who have their voice speed unbearably slow and barely scratch the surface of what technology can do for them. I think an interface where you can tell your phone what to do in natural language will really help a lot of less technical people.

I'm not getting my hopes up though given apple's history with Siri, which is truly awful.

[chipotle_coyote]

Apple's history with accessibility is, on the whole, pretty good. I strongly suspect that the "coming soon" part of this means "after we integrate Google Gemini models into the system," so I don't think you should use the current state of Siri as a yardstick. (I actually have decent luck with the current Siri, but I don't push it very much and have sort of adapted myself to its limitations; on the flip side, I have a lot of skepticism around LLMs, but they're really a quantum leap in natural language processing capability over what came before, and the use cases they're showing here seem to be right in the LLM wheelhouse -- with the asterisk of "you're still always going to have to check its work.")

[miki123211]

Coming soon very likely means iOS 27.

This has been the typical pattern for Apple for the last few years. The flashy features are announced at WWDC, accessibility has a dedicated, earlier press release. Before this practice, accessibility announcements would usually be tucked in some WWDC slide that most people wouldn't even notice.

[duskwuff]

> accessibility has a dedicated, earlier press release

IIRC, it's timed to land around Global Accessibility Awareness Day (May 21).

https://accessibility.day/

[Barbing]

The thing that disappointed me about this amazing announcement was “coming later this year“. They should probably give us dates for a little while at least until we get the (<)$95 checks.

I just would not wanna promise anything. Except “available for download this Friday“ once the gold master is passing tests.

[alwillis]

The "coming later this year" language is disappointing to some people, but that's just Apple propriety. Allow me to explain.

"Coming later this year" means it's part of a publicly committed release — iOS 27, macOS 27, etc. — not vaporware.

The annual pre-WWDC accessibility announcement is a tradition, and with the conference less than a month away, expect more detail then. New a11y features have a good chance of appearing in the 10am PT keynote or the Platforms State of the Union, the developer-focused follow-up at 1pm PT.

That said, things are still fluid with three weeks to go — features can be added or pulled at any time. If something gets bumped from the main presentations, there will almost certainly be a dedicated video session covering it.

As for availability: some of these features will land in the iOS 27 and macOS 27 betas, which drop during WWDC for Apple Developer Program members. The public beta follows in July, and there's a free tier of the developer program if you want early access.

Don't expect everything at once, though. Some features won't arrive until the September release candidates — and even then, a few may ship labeled "beta" or "experimental," or hold for a future dot release.

[alwillis]

> I strongly suspect that the "coming soon" part of this means "after we integrate Google Gemini models into the system…"

I don’t think the Google's tech has anything to do with these features.

This would had to have been in the works long before the Google announcement. Also, these are enhancements of existing iOS and macOS features. They don’t require an LLM anyway; these features use Apple’s Machine Learning models.

For example, creating subtitles for videos? iOS 16 introduced Live Captions for FaceTime calls in 2022 [1].

[1]: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2022/05/apple-previews-innova...

[thrownthatway]

Being able-bodied and sighted is probably the biggest disadvantage for using iOS.

Twenty years and text input & manipulation on iPhone sucks a big fat hair pair of dogs balls still.

The last time I daily drove Android was over two years ago and it was immeasurably less God-damn-I-wanna-dig-Jobs-corpse-up-n-give-the-guy-a-piece-of-my-mind, only problem is his grave is unmarked. Arsehole!

[isityettime]

Whenever my sister (blind) and I (visually impaired) visit my mom (blind) we secretly turn up the reading speed on her TV just a little because we can't stand how unbearably slow she keeps it, but if we turn it up quickly, she'll freak out.

After a few more years of Thanksgivings and Christmases and Mothers' Days, we'll finally train her up to a reasonable speed lmao.

[kridsdale1]

This is heartwarming. The audio equivalent to the practice of sighted people fixing the bad default settings on boomers’ televisions each Thanksgiving.