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You're reading way too much into it. These are just failed attempts at commercializing something.

- People hated the touchbar. Only years after it became liked, and only under tech enthusiasts that hacked and tweaked it to have much deeper functionality.

- Making the ejector out of an expensive alloy made no sense.

- Realitykit (and the Vision, which is also crashing and burning) is a solution looking for a problem.

- 3D touch had both discoverability and usability problems.

- etc etc.

Also their first own modem, shipped in their cheapest tier starting with the iPhone 16e.

'liquid metal' sounds cool. It's probably a metallic glass. I super dislike that it seemingly will be synonymous with the brand name by Apple even though that stuff has been around for decades.

Not that there are particularly many places where this is used - mostly because it really is just very expensive. In the awesome position that Apple is in, economic feasibility is so much easier to achieve, with like tens of millions of guaranteed parts to be preduced.

And their upcoming smart glasses are the best UX for almost everything they showed the user holding up her phone for.

I read their glasses when taking video or pics the lense will light up and or flash more prominently then Metas. Maybe that will help the whole privacy issue and also it's not Meta (do love my Meta or smart glasses as a whole will ditch Metas for Apple quickly as both pair of Metas broke & there's no store for support).

Man I miss the touch bar. Never got why people hated it so much

There's nothing agentic about these features. Live captions have existed on other platforms for more than 6 years now, before "agentic" had even been coined.

Was "LiquidMetal" anything more than a good aluminum alloy ?

I still have the Be My Eyes app installed but haven’t had a call in over a year - I think it’s a testament to how powerful AI vision models have become. I find it cool that AI works well enough for vision impaired people to solve all their problems.

However there was something very human and nice about helping out a stranger with a small random task from time to time. I fondly remember one older lady who spilled a box of blueberries on the kitchen floor and I helped her hunt them all down by guiding her around. It was 10 minutes of connection with a random person doing something fun and which is till remember fondly 4 years later

Ever since Be My Eyes introduced there AI features it's my understanding that there's been a lot less need for volunteers. I'm totally blind, and started using the app once they added in AI. It works great for for things like reading food labels after my kids have movved things around, determining if the tv has been left on, etc. I think I would use the volunteer feature if I still lived alone, but I don't.

Sadly, judging by the info I read on the website now, it seems to be focused on using AI assistance.

Not going to lie, it deeply worries me how quickly society is just accepting offloading what used to be meaningful human interactions to AI. I hate to imagine what a society looks like once the people in it solely rely on AI for navigating life.

Sorry for the bleak reply. I was genuinely excited to read about the service as you described it and would love to hear that the human assistance side of it still works even if the website only showcases the AI.

> I didn't get as many calls as I had hoped

They always had significantly more people willing to help than in need of help. Which is good, not going to knock that. I signed up for it many years ago but didn’t get a single call, so eventually I just uninstalled it.

Who called you? Blind people?

Wispr Flow is a masterclass in STT. Apple's solution feels like it's from the last century in comparison. Same applies with Apple's TTS when you have ElevenLabs and OpenAI running laps around it. All I need is for my iPhone to do those things natively at the same quality level (because in Apple's walled garden that's the only way to get them usable everywhere).

Yeah they could just take the open whisper model which really is great especially if you use the larger parameter versions. I love it.

Until siri can reliably handle "Navigate to <business that is a decade old>", offline and using pre-downloaded maps, I'm going to assume all the other, harder speech to text and conversational stuff is just vaporware.

I found another dreadful iPhone input "feature" yesterday. If you are browsing around in third party carplay apps, and ready to tap your selection, but instead press the accelerator first, it truncates the list to only a few items, and scrolls to the top.

Way to reduce driving distractions guys! What's next? If the car is moving, maps changes destinations?

I really wish human computer interaction research were more broadly applied, and if you do dumb stuff like all of the automotive / carplay world, then you'd be liable in court.

I once had a car that hid the backup cam behind a legal disclaimer every time you turned it on. I'm sure at least one pedestrian was hit by a car in reverse while that screen was on. The manufacturer should be 100% liable for the poor UI decision.

I don't think things have improved much on that front since Colin Hughes gave a run down on Voice Control's problems several years ago

https://www.theregister.com/on-prem/2023/08/16/those-who-rel...

Would be great if they could at least fix two major bugs:

* input simply fails (seemingly) randomly where it is supported and many apps from major vendors don't support dictation input at all (e.g. OneNote) (there should at least be a fallback (a la Dragon Dictate from decades ago) for those cases * capitalization is still random leaving you with many errors to correct

but Apple mostly seems to see accessibility as something to use to enable performative press releases not actual functionality...

One thing that helped me a lot to fix the iPhone keyboard was turning off slide to type. I learned that tip here on HN actually!

Open your Settings app. Tap on General. Scroll down and select Keyboard. Toggle off Slide to Type

All day every day my iPhone makes me feel like an idiot. I need to correct every other word I type (or at least what my iPhone thinks I typed). While correcting, autocorrect introduces new and even more baffling misspellings.

Sometimes it gets to “fever dream where you’re suddenly unable to successfully perform everyday tasks” levels of insanity.

And the worst part is: it used to be fine. I’d type more or less on full keyboard levels of speed and accuracy on my iPhone 4S.

It’d be amazing if speech-to-text could take into account context as well: Greek if I’m speaking Greek, Korean if I’m speaking Korean, or for (int i = 0; i < count; ++i) if I’m dictating code.

Apple dictation on MacOS is actually pretty dang good. I've got it bound to a double-tap on fn and I use it pretty regularly.

speaking of touch though they musn't have touched the swipe-typing feature in a while because somehow it works even better than the keyboard for me most of the time! No nonsense words like "oul" instead of "oil" constantly.

I use Aqua Voice because Apple STT is so frustrating.

I turned off my iphone’s autocorrect because it made too many stealth errors. Now I notice all my mistypes.

I have a friend named Zi in my contacts. For some reason ios kept autocorrecting “I” to “Zi” and would do it too far back for me to notice.

What’s weird is how this is such a dumb bug that Apple usually irons out.

I want to echo the comments that you just made.

One of my primary methods of interacting with an iPhone is through speech and the state of Apple speech transcription is pretty horrible. It bothers me greatly.

I know some of the workarounds and things but it does feel like it’s in the Stone ages.

I don’t think it’s a microphone issue since iPhone microphones are fairly decent and I don’t think it’s a CPU issue either because Apple Silicon seems to be some of the best on the market. Which leaves us with the software…

Maybe they should put that cash hoard to good use and buy up some of these transcription companies or license their IP so we get truly high-quality transcription.

There’s so much complaining about their keyboard issues, and it’s really an infuriating part of the iOS experience. The phone being hard to grip/slippery doesn't help, no…

https://youtu.be/wKISPePFrIs?si=ahGfFp0U7-pTU9w6&t=43

my go to example of this is this talk by Saqib Shaikh (a blind software engineer at Microsoft) giving a talk about Visual Studio. Link is timestamped

I did IT for a community Center way back in the day and the director was blind. I was blown away by how fast his screen reader read things out to him - completely incomprehensible to me - and his efficiency with keyboard shortcuts would put even vim/emacs elitists to shame.

Probably because it's an advertisement, and super fast robot voices can feel extremely harsh and annoying. Even blind people who rely on them find them overstimulating sometimes, lol.

Indeed, and not just fast, but often heavily robotic (which many sighted people struggle to understand even at 1.5x). I remember reading about a blind person who learned how to do echo-location using sound, and it seemed like such a cool superpower, that one of these days I'm going to take the plunge and unplug my monitor and start learning how to really use the tools. I worked with a blind person a few years back who got almost double the battery life from his laptop as the rest of us by having the screen off all the time, so that alone would be a nice feature. I may never get to the epic level of echo-location, but if I get even half-way there it would be awesome. With a bonus of being able to actually QA a11y changes.

Twenty years ago I took a level 1 tech support call from a visually impairment guy and it took about 3.2 seconds to realise his condition was no impediment for using a computer because of the screen reader tech he was using.

> Honestly if you ever observe a blind person using computers you'd impressed how they can listen to audio at unimaginable speeds.

Even better, fire up Orca (or whatever screenreader application your OS comes with) yourself and try to use your computer while shutting your eyes, kind of eye-opening (no pun intended) what kind of experience these sort of users typically get. And also, you quickly start to understand why they set the speech rate for their voice synthesizer to be so fast, it's almost unbearable navigating applications (and particularly lists) otherwise.

I listen to a lot of podcasts and YouTube videos at 3x or 4x speed now, having slowly built up the skill over a few years. It's pretty nice now and saves time, and it's remarkable how well the human brain can adapt to such input.

The difference is that the voice in the video is a natural, human voice. It's the robotic sounding voices that always pronounce the same letters the exact same way (mostly the Eloquence family of voices) that enable blind people to listen at superhuman speeds. You can't listen to a real voice that fast.

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.

Blind people can't change video speed? The control is available right there.

I briefly worked at a call center and I would hear supervisors listening to recorded calls at warp speed.

I've heard textual description tracks on television programs before. They come fast, but not screen-reader fast. To the untrained ear a blind person's screen reader sounds like when you somehow get the TI-99/4A's speech synthesizer to read from invalid memory.

dont you worry, as a sighted person I am also infuriated by apples slooow reading speed, e.g. for "Announce Notifications".

I think we should reserve judgment until this lands in the hands of the people it helps.

My experience is limited to my elderly parents who have trouble seeing. With the text size Apple allows them to set it to, their phones are unreadable. Text runs off the screen in every app, 1st and 3rd party.

In their bill example, the user is told to confirm with the provider. Why not offer to call the number on the bill? Instead of telling them to use text detection, do it for them? Presumably Apple Intelligence would already have that capability. I’m afraid this will be a gimmick at best.

EDIT: Forgot to mention, the grip is good to see. Hopefully they don’t charge the apple tax on it.

This is what Apple does best.

They treat new industry advancements as technology, not products itself.

AI will be a feature to improve the customer experience, not the product itself.

I agree. There seems to be a lot of potential in this space (from my outsider view). I really hope that this issue from an earlier article (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48178378) doesn't become common enough to make useful functionality like this a danger. Seems unlikely in the short term but as use cases grow, so might the bad actors.

Its with their servers right? Do they trust a iPhone with their life? Or they are trusting their data center?

Let's be honest, compare the amount of money a corporation can make helping visually impaired people to the amount of money they can make replacing software developers and financial analysts.

Don't get me wrong, Apple using these technologies to help humans who are in need of help is laudable. But let's not pretend we don't know why most corporations don't look into this kind of thing. I think if we're being honest, we all very much know why they leave this sort of thing to the always nebulous "others".

> help humans instead of replacing us or squeezing us as hard as possible in the name of productivity

Increasing their productivity is helping humans.

Aren't the LLM-based features of this announcement catch-up features? Describing the contents of the screen is something Gemini has been doing on Pixel phones for a while. It's a fairly obvious use case for a multimodal AI.

My one hope is that this eventually becomes widespread enough to stop alt text scolds.

"looks like" there are a lot of automated accessibility systems that fall woefully short in practical use

this sort of thing really needs input from someone that uses it before we can judge it

It's been done for a while - follow the links to who they reference. ie https://www.tolt.tech but it's their integration they've done into the OS is interesting.

Seems like a pretty strong indicator that AR glasses are still being worked on, this definitely feels like one of those features Apple ships to refine before the proper hardware is ready.

It’s still useful to get the information instantly and verify it later. Arguably asking someone you trust to read the number for you might be a better idea than calling the company. Not everybody has that option though.

Once you paid the same bill for a few months you'll know how much your phone bill will roughly be and you'll not have to do. They obviously have to put that line in there, just like ChatGPT saying "Please verify everything we tell you" in the footer.

I presume that calling customer support is at least as frustrating for people with disabilities as it is for anyone.

It might be useful if it remembered a bill for, say, 60 days, and could also comment on percent difference since the last one. "The total amount due on the bill is $83.89 which is 4% higher than last month's bill from the same company."

+1. Unless things have changed in the past hour since I first read this, this is the first blind/low vision individual with a top-level comment here.

And it was valuable to me as someone going from "bad but correctable" vision to low vision. I didn't know all those apps existed. I've been looking for exactly that sort of assistive technology.

it's so validating getting the same conclusion we got to from someone that i've never met. it seems that they create these products without ever speaking with someone with that problem.

Funnily enough we're creating a competitor of these third party app that you mention, with the huge experience of my colleague that is son of blind parents.

We have an mvp online but it's not much yet and i really don't want to be the "do you know i have an app?" guy.

nice to hear an opinion from a primary source!

One thing confused me though - you felt like the on-device processing is likely a gimmick. I naively assumed this is a big deal because it means it always work, regardless of your cell service. On the subway, on an airplane, in the middle of nowhere, etc.

Unrelated, what app makes the biggest difference to you in your day to day life?

Change the audio language to "English descriptive".

Wearing a headset in the back of an Uber doesn't sound that crazy,

I use those motion cues on my iPhone even though I don't struggle with motion sickness https://www.youtube.com/shorts/OxbjggMcKrk

It's really useful for having a decent screen up in front of me when I'm a passenger trying to do something on the laptop. Saves staring down at my lap, and removes any motion on my screen from the peripheral view of the driver.

Still somewhat odd when a bus drives out from behind your Terminal mind.

From the article: "new features for controlling power wheelchairs with Apple Vision Pro"

Someone using this feature will want motion cues as well.

And in your quote: Dwell Control is a feature set to interact with an Apple Vision Pro using only your eyes. Lingering your gaze on a button will press it. An AVP is now more comfortable to use in more situations because of motion cues.

Maybe just rethink your "maybe just" comment...?

Trains. Airplanes. TFA said vehicle, not car.

Trains are a thing.

Planes? Trains? If you haven't used these motion dots, they actually do work wonders. My wife gets motion sickness and could barely ever look at her phone when riding as a passenger in the car, even just to type in directions. With the motion dots she does just fine.

>Maybe just don't wear them in a car?

Why not?

So we're blaming disabled people now.

> A lot of us forget it, but things like text to speech, subtitles etc are there for the differently abled

They are there for everyone. You don’t need to have a permanent disability to benefit from accessibility features. A device designed to work one handed is useful to someone without an arm or a person with two arms who is holding a baby. Subtitles are useful to someone who can’t hear or someone lying to a sleeping spouse or in a noisy place.

“Accessibility needs can be permanent, temporary or situational.”

https://www.coursearc.com/accessibility-content-fundamentals...

Have you ever tried the accessibility feature on Android ? Would you recommend one or the other for your use case ?

And what about windows (if you use it) ?

I think that we should all be concerned by the accessibility feature, we never know what is going to happen in life.

I don’t think abysmal is the right word. The hardware was widely praised except for being dorky looking and a few other complaints.

The price and lack of content and developer interest have been the main problems.

And ultimately, people just don’t seem that interested in this product category. Meta ran into the same issue, though at least they targeted gaming where there is a decent niche.

VR/AR tech seems cool and futuristic, but hasn’t quite found its killer app yet.

Wonder if it can translate it too.

My biggest gripe with Netflix is that they only have like 3 languages and no auto translation. And even bigger gripe is that it's because of the union racket. They apparently need to pay hundreds of thousands for something computers do for free. Insanity.

It's a picture of a blind person. The type of person these features are for.

Accessible PDFs are quite rare in reality. Especially if there are tables, graphics, maths, forms or anything more than plane text.

We use "disabled people" these days. Or, "people with disabilities." There's debate around person first or not, but I'll leave that to you all to read up one. Regardless of where you come down on DP vs PWD, "differently abled" is a thing of the past.

Your concerns are completely nonsensical. It's clearly being marketed as a healthcare tool for people with debilitating injuries that preclude the use of hand-powered wheelchair controls, severe situations where there's no neck-down control and users would be limited to controls like head-tilt or mouth actuated systems. These people obviously require daily care to simply get them out of bed and into the chair and back again every single day - their nurse could just put on their Vision Pro for them! This seems like an incredible leap forward for people in this situation, if they iterate on this and it gets better then this could be a very viable wheelchair control system in the future.

Brain Control Interface support was already announced last year and afaik is part of iOS already.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/accessibility/brai...

They roughly know how many of their users use a particular language.

They won't, its literally part of their sales funnel. They've specifically engineered a bad experience for anyone outside the ecosystem by making it all of their friend's problem too. Its very important for their stock price that text messages sent by non apple products are just slightly more difficult to read.

That wouldn't let them say “AI”.

The problem is using a language model to assess images.

Probably 80% of "LLM's are below expectation" complaints (from the general population) involves some form of image analyses.

Image tokenization is hard because unlike language tokenization, where every token is extremely dense with meaning, image tokens tends to be meaningless or irrelevant but are processed all the same.

Give an SOTA LLM a picture of toothpicks and ask it to move one to make a square, and it will probably struggle and fumble it. But give a mid-size LLM from 2 years ago the same problem in verbal form, and it will nail it almost every time.

That takeaway is, do everything you can to avoid having the LLM need to rely on images for the answer.

Most of those videos are chatGPT voice mode, which still used gpt 4o last time I checked. it is far from SOTA.

Like coding, creating images or text, maybe the alternative of doing it yourself is too easy or enjoyable for you. Don't expect that will be true for everyone.

Maybe on a smartphone, but usually not on a computer. Keyboards are pretty good.

The other thing is that if you're around others, voice input means you have no privacy. Even if you're not doing anything particularly private, it's a bit awkward and potentially embarrassing. If you use touch input in conjunction with a screen reader, you can be more like a "normal" user in that what you're doing is just between you and your phone.

Audio input is far more commonly used by people with mobility difficulties. Imagine that your hands shake a lot or that you don't have limbs. That makes using a keyboard and mouse difficult or impossible and voice input can help. Blind users generally use keyboards for input, the typical ones you find on a PC but also sometimes the keys on their Braille display.

They don't get, but they will be using Gemini derived models with iOS 27. For now it's all their own models.

Live captions has existed for more than 6 years on Android. https://ai.googleblog.com/2019/10/on-device-captioning-with-...

Selecting text from anything displayed on the screen for more than 7 years. https://www.thurrott.com/mobile/android/165834/android-9-pie...

I guess if you knew people using Android, you would have known you needed it 7 years ago?

Until they added it, you didn't need it, then suddenly a phone was unusable without it.

I can do that on my Pixel 6.

for every person like your coworker, there are probably several who have a much harder time with technology and who would benefit from a simpler interface.

If this includes improvements to the screen recognition feature in Voice Over, it could provide accessibility for apps where the developer doesn't care about accessibility, which is extremely common.

The vision capabilities could be useful if they are done well, but I suspect that will always be covered better by 3rd party apps.

I mean even if it is marketing for them they still did the work and developed these features. I had some vision issues recently and was glad there were options to make text more legible to me.

Additionally I don't believe this is just marketing. This is adaption to a changing market. Apple's customer base is aging and having these kinds of features will allow them to keep using Apple products for a longer.