> Vehicle Motion Cues is a new experience for iPhone and iPad that can help reduce motion sickness for passengers in moving vehicles.
This excites me so, so much! I can't really use my phone as a passenger in a car without getting motion sick after 1-2 minutes. This seems like it might be a promising thing to try.
I used to get bad nausea from aggressive physic-y VR games. But I heard people claim it can be grinded through. So I did that, and they were right. I can do VR games without needed to vomit although it’s still uncomfortable.
However… I am now much more sensitive to non VR motion sickness. :|
I played games my whole life and was shocked I had near instant VR motion sickness in sim racing. Can confirm it can be grinded through, recognize the feelings and stop immediately.
Yes, sort of. I don’t necessarily have to feel hungry but if I’m on an empty stomach or just haven’t eaten in a while, the odds I get motion sickness are much higher.
If I’m riding somewhere to go get dinner, I have to sit in the front passenger seat. After dinner with a full belly? Throw me in the back and I’ll be fine.
I regularly drive two family members around—one gets motion sick much faster and more frequently when hungry, while the other gets motion sick the same either way.
I wonder what new voices will be added to VoiceOver? We blind people never, ever thought Eloquence, an old TTS engine from 20 years ago now, would ever come to iOS. And yet, here it is in iOS 17. I wouldn't be surprised to see DecTalk, or more Siri voices. More Braille features is amazing, and they even mentioned the Mac! VoiceOver for Mac is notoriously never given as much love as VoiceOver for iOS is, so most blind people still use Windows, even though they have iPhones.
I was expecting to see much better image descriptions, but they've already announced a ton of new stuff for plenty other disabilities. Having haptic music will be awesome even for me, adding another sense to the music. There are just so many new accessibility stuff, and I can't wait to see what all is really new in VoiceOver, since there's always new things not talked about in WWDC or release notes. I'm hoping that, one day, we get a tutorial for VoiceOver, like TalkBack on Android has, since there are so many commands, gestures, and settings that a new user never learns unless they learn to learn about them.
>I'm hoping that, one day, we get a tutorial for VoiceOver
Maybe it's not feasible for you but if you're ever near an Apple Store, you could definitely call them and ask whether they have an accessibility expert you could talk to. In the Barcelona Apple Store for example, there is a blind employee who is an expert at using Apple's accessibility features on all their devices. He loves explaining his tips and tricks to anyone who needs to.
My friends that use synthetic voices prefer cleanliness of the older and familiar voices. One friend listens at about 900 WPM in skim mode and none of the more realistic voices work well at those rates.
Every once in a while I'll hear a blind person's phone audio while I'm out and about and it sounds like an unintelligible stream of noises, but they're interacting with it and using it and getting information from it. It's amazing, a whole other world of interaction from what I experience with my phone. I kind of want to learn how they're interacting with it.
Back in the 90s we reverse engineered / patched the classic MacInTalk to speed up playback. Our testers had it cranked so fast as they navigated the UI that to me it sounded more like musical notes than text.
The image description stuff is already surprisingly good - I noticed when I got a photo text while driving and it described it well enough for me to know what it was.
This is a good time to remind everyone that tomorrow, May 16th is Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) (https://accessibility.day), and that there are over 176 events worldwide going on to celebrate the process we are all making at improving accessibility in our products -- any plenty of learning opportunities for beginners and experts.
Accessibility settings are really a gold mine on iOS for device customization (yes, I agree, they shouldn’t be limited to accessibility).
I’m particularly interested in the motion cues and the color filters for CarPlay - I have color filters set up to enable every night as kind of a Turbo-night shift mode (deep orange-red color shift), would love to do the same for CarPlay.
I also completely forgot iOS had a magnifier built in!
Accessibility features tend to be superpowers though, and I'm glad Apple gates them behind permissions and opt-ins. We all know of applications who try to trick the user into granting them inappropriate access to the device through the Accessibility APIs. I think DropBox still begs you to grant them Accessibility access so its tendrils can do who-knows-what to your system.
Guaranteed that marketers are salivating at the idea of eye tracking on apps and website. It's an amazing feature that absolutely needs to be gatekept.
It varies. Things like keyboard control or that kind of thing, absolutely, but mostly I've used it for stuff like "don't make an animated transition every time I change pages like an overcaffienated George Lucas" or "actually make night shift shift enough to be useful at night". I also use the background sounds to augment noise cancellation while taking a nap. All of those are just useful things or personal settings, not necessarily attack vectors.
My favorite is the "allow ANC with just one AirPod in". I have no idea why this would be an accessibility feature. If I turn on ANC, then I don't want it to be disabled just because I'm listening with one ear!
Well, they aren't really limited to accessibility, but they are hidden there. It's sort of like a convenient excuse to get UI designers off your back if you want to ship customization.
I love accessibility features because they might be the last features developed solely with the benefit of the user in mind. So many other app/os features are designed to steal your attention or gradually nerf usefulness.
I often use them to get around bad UI/UX (like using Reduce Motion), or to make devices more useful (Color Filters (red) for using at night).
Even outside of this, even able-bodied folks can be disabled due to illness, surgery, injury, etc. So it's great to see Apple continuing to support accessibility.
The red color filter for outside when trying to preserve night vision is a great tip. Some apps have this built-in but much better to have the OS change it everywhere.
Recommend creating a Shortcut to toggle this setting.
I don't love that solid UX gets pushed under the accessibility rug, as an option you might never find.
I don't care how cynical it sounds, user experience became user exploitation a long time ago. Big Tech have been running that gimmick at too-big-to-fail scale for the last decade or so.
Let's say you're a developer at a big software company (not necessarily Apple, this happens everywhere) and you want to add a new optional setting.
The bar is pretty high. There are already hundreds of settings. Each one adds cost and complexity. So even if it's a good idea, the leadership might say "no".
Now let's say this same setting makes a big difference in usability for some people with disabilities. You just want to put it in accessibility settings. It won't clutter the rest of the UI.
The iPhone has a hidden accessibility setting where you can map and double and/or triple tap of the back of your phone to a handful of actions. I use this to trigger Reachability (the feature that brings the entire UI halfway down the screen so you can reach buttons at the top) because phone screens are so damn big that I can't reach the opposite top corner with my thumb even on my 13 mini without hand gymnastics. And the normal Reachability gesture is super unreliable to trigger ever since they got rid of the front Touch ID home button.
Accessibility benefits everyone, but in the basics you’re right. Too many simple straightforward options are now strictly inside accessibility. At least on the Apple side.
And don’t get me started on hidden command line settings.
Some of them are, at least on Apple's side, but it's always for a good technical reason. Screen recognition is only available on devices that have a neural chip, things that require lidar don't work on devices that don't have lidar and so on.
Google is worse at this, Talkback multi-finger gestures used to be Pixel and Samsung exclusive for a while, even though there was no technical reason for it.
Apple has a different problem, many accessibility features aren't internationalized properly. Screen recognition still has issues on non-english systems, so do image descriptions. Voice Over (especially on Mac) didn't include voices for some of the less-popular languages until very recently, even though Vocalizer, their underlying speech engine, has supported them for years. Siri has the same problem.
Every attention thief is absolutely thrilled at the idea of tracking your eyes. Let’s all imagine the day where the YouTube free tier pauses ads when you’re not actively looking at them.
Shit. I’m turning into one of those negative downers. I’m sorry. I’ve had too much internet today.
Wouldn't a lot of the companies that build in accessibility do it from a viewpoint of gaining an even wider reach and/or a better public image?
I don't see optimizing for that as bad. If they think we'll love the product more by making it better for a given audience, especially if I'm in that audience, I'm happy. Does that mean this company now gets richer? Perhaps, and that's fine by me
This will happen. These features are always ushered in as ways to make someone's life easier, and often that is exactly what it does, for a time, before some product manager figures out how they can maximize profit with it.
This is why Apple is the best. They’ll make features like this because it’s the right thing to do, even if it won’t really make any difference to 99.99% of their customers.
This was the right thing to do, but I doubt “the right thing to do” was the primary motivator for it. This is smart marketing that helps position them as the more caring, inclusive, and capable tech brand. It also expands their reach more than a fraction of a percent. 13% of Americans have some form of disability.
The accessibility features are also useful for automated UI testing.
>They’ll make features like this because it’s the right thing to do
While the positivity is great to see -- I'd temper that expectation they're simply doing the right thing and definitely acting in their perceived interest. People can and often do the right thing -- large companies rarely do.
Do you realize how bad Apple's accessibility issues were before? This is just marketing and I doubt many people are going to drop thousands of bucks to ditch years of tooling they're already intimately familiar with (aka, Windows), but this is an effort to try and entice some people. That's all it is. Marketing.
I have better than 20/20 vision (yes, really) and now mobility problems, but there are some macOS accessibility features that I love.
One is Zoom: I hold down two modifier keys and scroll, and can instantly zoom in to any part of the screen. It is extremely smooth, the more you scroll the higher you zoom, instantly and with high frame rate. Great when you want to show someone something, or just zoom into a detail of something if the app doesn’t support it or is two cumbersome. Or “pseudo-fullscreen” something.
The other one is three finger drag on the trackpad. Why that isn’t default is beyond me. It means that if you use three fingers, any dragging on the trackpad behaves as if you held the button down. It’s so convenient.
The default way to drag on a trackpad is something I’ve never gotten good with so I always enable drag lock the second I get a new laptop. Ideally I would switch to the three finger gesture but after 15 years of drag lock I just can’t get my brain to switch over.
It's better to have an easy way to hold a mouse button via keyboard with your left hand and continue to use one finger on the touchpad rather than do the whole three fingers to drag
three finger dragger for life here. whenever I see colleagues struggling to drag items on a Mac, I show them three finger dragging and it blows them away. total game-changer!
If accurate enough it seems like eye tracking could be useful beyond accessibility to eg control iPads without dragging one’s greasy fingers all over the screen. iPad already supports pointers.
Readit News
This excites me so, so much! I can't really use my phone as a passenger in a car without getting motion sick after 1-2 minutes. This seems like it might be a promising thing to try.
I used to get bad nausea from aggressive physic-y VR games. But I heard people claim it can be grinded through. So I did that, and they were right. I can do VR games without needed to vomit although it’s still uncomfortable.
However… I am now much more sensitive to non VR motion sickness. :|
Unsure if it actually works though, my personal test results are mixed.
If I’m riding somewhere to go get dinner, I have to sit in the front passenger seat. After dinner with a full belly? Throw me in the back and I’ll be fine.
I don't sit in enough EVs to tell if they're the same.
Does make me wonder what the difference is there.
Dead Comment
I was expecting to see much better image descriptions, but they've already announced a ton of new stuff for plenty other disabilities. Having haptic music will be awesome even for me, adding another sense to the music. There are just so many new accessibility stuff, and I can't wait to see what all is really new in VoiceOver, since there's always new things not talked about in WWDC or release notes. I'm hoping that, one day, we get a tutorial for VoiceOver, like TalkBack on Android has, since there are so many commands, gestures, and settings that a new user never learns unless they learn to learn about them.
Maybe it's not feasible for you but if you're ever near an Apple Store, you could definitely call them and ask whether they have an accessibility expert you could talk to. In the Barcelona Apple Store for example, there is a blind employee who is an expert at using Apple's accessibility features on all their devices. He loves explaining his tips and tricks to anyone who needs to.
I’m particularly interested in the motion cues and the color filters for CarPlay - I have color filters set up to enable every night as kind of a Turbo-night shift mode (deep orange-red color shift), would love to do the same for CarPlay.
I also completely forgot iOS had a magnifier built in!
With great power comes great responsibility.
Even outside of this, even able-bodied folks can be disabled due to illness, surgery, injury, etc. So it's great to see Apple continuing to support accessibility.
Recommend creating a Shortcut to toggle this setting.
I don't care how cynical it sounds, user experience became user exploitation a long time ago. Big Tech have been running that gimmick at too-big-to-fail scale for the last decade or so.
The bar is pretty high. There are already hundreds of settings. Each one adds cost and complexity. So even if it's a good idea, the leadership might say "no".
Now let's say this same setting makes a big difference in usability for some people with disabilities. You just want to put it in accessibility settings. It won't clutter the rest of the UI.
You just turned your "no" into a "yes".
And don’t get me started on hidden command line settings.
Hopefully accessibility features are never artificially segmented to higher priced devices.
Google is worse at this, Talkback multi-finger gestures used to be Pixel and Samsung exclusive for a while, even though there was no technical reason for it.
Apple has a different problem, many accessibility features aren't internationalized properly. Screen recognition still has issues on non-english systems, so do image descriptions. Voice Over (especially on Mac) didn't include voices for some of the less-popular languages until very recently, even though Vocalizer, their underlying speech engine, has supported them for years. Siri has the same problem.
Shit. I’m turning into one of those negative downers. I’m sorry. I’ve had too much internet today.
I don't see optimizing for that as bad. If they think we'll love the product more by making it better for a given audience, especially if I'm in that audience, I'm happy. Does that mean this company now gets richer? Perhaps, and that's fine by me
Growth at all costs, I guess.
They really earn consumer loyalty.
“When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind, I don’t consider the bloody ROI”.
>They’ll make features like this because it’s the right thing to do
While the positivity is great to see -- I'd temper that expectation they're simply doing the right thing and definitely acting in their perceived interest. People can and often do the right thing -- large companies rarely do.
There are companies which try (and succeed) to be honest "citizens". Berkshire and Costco have quite good reputations.
When I hear eye tracking I immediately think of advertisers targeting me based on what I look at, NOT quadriplegics using Apple devices.
Maybe I'm a cynic
I'd also like to see what sort of weird stuff people come up with to use eye tracking. Games could use that in interesting ways.
One is Zoom: I hold down two modifier keys and scroll, and can instantly zoom in to any part of the screen. It is extremely smooth, the more you scroll the higher you zoom, instantly and with high frame rate. Great when you want to show someone something, or just zoom into a detail of something if the app doesn’t support it or is two cumbersome. Or “pseudo-fullscreen” something.
The other one is three finger drag on the trackpad. Why that isn’t default is beyond me. It means that if you use three fingers, any dragging on the trackpad behaves as if you held the button down. It’s so convenient.
But sounds like something accessibility options may also provide, and I can see how it may be better for a lot of people.
Meant to write “no mobility problems”, but too late to edit now.