accessibility

As he continues making the rounds in Europe. Tim Cook made an appearance at Apple’s retail location in Glasgow. While Cook has stopped in at multiple Apple Stores over the last week, this visit is especially notable because Cook got the opportunity to talk to Angela Reed, a cerebral palsy sufferer who relies on iPhone for its accessibility features…

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Apple kicked off today’s keynote with a video highlighting some of the accessibility features of Apple products, such as spoken alerts letting a blind person know when the camera has detected a face and locked focus on it …

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Apple VP of environment, policy and social initiatives Lisa Jackson has  shared a story via ABC7 News about a nine-year-old boy whose hearing was restored thanks to a new type of bone-conduction hearing aid controlled by a companion iPhone app. Highlighting accessibility and inclusion, Jackson wrote that ‘technology can transform lives [and] 9-year old Joshua is a great example.’

Joshua Gomez started losing his hearing at the age of three, and a succession of surgeries over a five-year period all failed. Conventional hearing-aids couldn’t help with his particular condition, but the Children’s Hearing Center at Stanford finally found a solution … 

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Apple has always been vocal about its commitment to accessibility features for its products, and now a member of the company’s accessibility design and quality team is speaking up on just how committed Apple is. A new profile from Mashable details Jordyn Castor, a 22-year-old, blind engineer.

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Apple briefly mentioned some accessibility enhancements during its press event this week — watchOS 3 is adding wheelchair specific optimizations to Apple Watch — but iOS 10, macOS Sierra, tvOS 10 and watchOS 3 also have many other improvements to assist users with motor, vision, hearing, and learning impairments. Here’s the rundown…

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As rumored late last year, Apple has now added a dedicated accessibility accessories category to its online store. As Amvsement noted, Apple currently offers a total of 15 products, addressing the three areas of vision, physical & motor skills, and learning & literacy.

For those who are blind or partially sighted, Apple offers two different braille displays which serve as both screen-readers and control keyboards. For those with motor skills impairment, products include an over-sized trackball and a wide variety of switches to trigger functions on a Mac or iOS device. Devices for learning disabilities include a ‘tactile musical interface’ to provide a fun way to create music …

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At a time when so many Facebook posts comprise a photo and a brief comment, there’s one group of people who get rather left out of the picture: those who are blind and partially sighted. That’s a problem Facebook is fixing, starting from today. The iOS app now uses artificial intelligence to figure out the content of photos, and Apple’s VoiceOver feature to read aloud a description of them.

The Verge got a demo of the feature, which Facebook calls ‘automatic alt text.’

Automatic alt text, which is coming to iOS today and later to Android and the web, recognizes objects in photos using machine learning […] While still in its early stages, the technology can reliably identify concepts in categories including transportation (“car,” “boat,” “airplane”), nature (“snow,” “ocean,” “sunset”), sports (“basketball court”), and food (“sushi”). The technology can also describe people (“baby,” “smiling,” beard”), and identify a selfie.

Facebook said that there were two approaches it could have taken to the problem, and it chose the one it believed would be most successful …

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My iPhone 6s is not jailbroken, but there are still a couple of tricks that I employ that make it closer to that of a jailbroken phone. For example, getting rid of animations — a feat normally reserved for users willing to jailbreak — is now available to all iOS 9 users via the handy SpringBoard animations glitch.

Another trick, one that I haven’t been shy about sharing in the past, involves reducing iPhone screen brightness beyond levels that are possible with the standard brightness slider controls. Like the animations glitch, this too uses iOS’ deep accessibility features to pull off the job. If you’re someone who likes to use an iPhone or iPad at night, then your eyes will thank you for this trick.
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One of the things that makes iOS special is its SpringBoard animations. The animations help orient the user around iOS using 3D space.

But not everyone is a fan of iOS’ animations — some for purely aesthetic reasons and others for health reasons. With this in mind, Apple has provided a way to reduce the animations using the Reduce Motion switch found in the Accessibility settings. Even with that option available, some wish to take the reduction of animations even further and disable them altogether.

Up until now, many of the available options for disabling animations relied on jailbreaking. But a new iOS glitch found by a redditor makes it possible to completely get rid of SpringBoard animations until you reboot your iPhone. Watch our step-by-step video walkthrough inside to see how.
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Apple today has launched a new page on the App Store dedicated to showcasing apps that take advantage of the Accessibility features on iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. Apple says that the section is meant to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act. The Accessibility featured page on the App Store is further broken down into sections for Vision, Hearing, Speech, Learning and Literacy, and Physical and Motor Skill.

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Apple has released the first software update for Apple Watch today with the release of Watch OS 1.0.1. The update is available through the Apple Watch app on iPhone.
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Hearing aids are pretty sophisticated pieces of technology these days, capable of adjusting the sound they pick up to suit a range of different environments, from a noisy restaurant to a windy day outside. A button allows users to cycle between modes, but some go further, an app allowing the user to fine-tune things like the arc of sound captured, letting them hear what is being said by companions while blocking out extraneous sound.

In a video on CNN Money, a man whose hearing was badly affected by a brain tumor demonstrates how an app on his Apple Watch allows him to control his ReSound hearing-aid … 
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One of the things I find most inspiring about the iPhone is the way it can be adapted to create very low-cost versions of what would otherwise be very expensive medical equipment, unaffordable in many parts of the world. We’ve previously seen this approach taken for things as diverse as HIV tests, skin cancer detection and eye injury diagnosis.

The UC Berkeley has just added blood parasite detection to the list, using a 3D-printed case, Arduini board with Bluetooth module and LED lighting … 
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The American Foundation for the Blind today announced four honorees for the upcoming Helen Keller Achievement Awards, highlighting Apple’s VoiceOver and Accessibility efforts alongside actor Charlie Cox, musician Ward Marston, and biopharmaceutical company Vanda Pharmaceuticals.

The foundation says that it gives this award to “accomplished individuals and companies for their success in improving quality of life for people with vision loss either through groundbreaking innovation or inspirational achievement that changes perceptions about what it means to be visually impaired.”

Apple is specifically being awarded for VoiceOver Accessibility technology across its products, per the announcement:

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Apple Watch Accessibility Settings

Apple told employees during a week at the flagship Berlin Apple Store in Germany that the company will increase its focus on product accessibility by putting executive Lisa Jackson in charge of the efforts, according to people in attendance. Asked by an Apple Store employee if the Apple Watch will include accessibility features, Cook reportedly replied:

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