In honor of Global Accessibility Awareness Day, Tim Cook invited a trio of YouTubers to Apple’s campus. For instance, YouTuber Rikki Poynter sat down with Cook to discuss Accessibility and Apple’s role in that area. For those unfamiliar, Poynter is a 25-year-old deaf YouTuber who started out with a focus on beauty products but has since switched to advocacy for closed captioning, signing, and the deaf culture.
In her sit-down with Tim Cook, Poynter discusses the Apple products she uses, why Apple cares about accessibility, and more. Additionally, Tim Cook sat down with blind YouTuber James Rath, and Accessible Hollywood…
Cook opened the interview with Poynter by asking about the Apple products she uses, which she says include the iPhone, MacBook, iPad, and Apple Watch, which she has just recently started incorporating into her lifestyle. From there, Poynter tells Cook a bit more about her YouTube background and efforts in closed captioning awareness.
After hearing about Poynter’s struggles with finding captioned videos, Cook asks if she’s tried Apple’s new Clips app at all, because it has support for auto-captioning videos. She explains that she’s really impressed with how the app works for captioning, though she says it has difficulty understanding her due to her deaf accent.
Poynter then asks Cook why Apple cares about accessibility, to which he responds by saying that Apple believes accessibility is a human right:
Apple is founded on giving people power to create things, to do things they couldn’t do without those tools. We’ve always viewed accessibility as a human right, and just like human rights are for everyone, we want our products to be accessible to everyone.
It’s a basic core value of Apple. We don’t make products for a particular group of people; we make products for everybody. We feel very strongly that everyone deserves an equal opportunity and equal access. We don’t look at this thing for a return on investment. I’ve been asked that before and the answer is no. We don’t care about that.
A lot of these Accessibility features, everyone can use. With HomeKit, I use HomeKit every day and control my house with my voice.
It’s a basic core value of Apple.
The Accessible Hollywood interview was actually shot entirely using Clips and focuses on similar topics, including Apple Watch and Apple’s iOS Accessibility features. In the sit-down with James Rather, Cook again calls accessibility a basic human right, while also noting of the security and privacy focus employed by Apple.
Apple last night released a series of videos in honor of Global Accessibility Awareness Day, focused on how users with disabilities use Apple products every day.
Watch Tim Cook’s sit-down conversations in honor of GAAD below.
Thanks @JamesRath @PintSzDiva @RikkiPoynter for visiting Apple for #GAAD! Great conversations about the importance of accessibility. pic.twitter.com/APg8J3LRvY
— Tim Cook (@tim_cook) May 18, 2017
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