Every third Thursday in May, the world commemorates Global Accessibility Awareness Day or GAAD. And as has been the norm for the past few years, major technology companies are taking this week as an opportunity to share their latest accessibility-minded products. From Apple and Google to Webex and Adobe, the biggest players in the industry are rolling out new features to make their products easier to use. Here’s a quick tour of this week’s GAAD news.
Apple’s launch and update
First: Apple. The company actually has a lot of updates to share, which makes sense since it usually releases the most accessibility-centric news around this time each year. For 2023, Apple introduced Assistive Access, which is an accessibility setting that, when turned on, changes the home screen for iPhone and iPad to a layout with fewer distractions and icons . You can choose from a row-based or grid-based layout, and the latter results in a 2×3 arrangement of large icons. You can decide what it is, and most of Apple’s first-party apps will be available here.
The icons themselves are larger than usual, with high-contrast labels that make them more readable. When you tap on an app, a back button appears at the bottom for easy navigation. Assistive Access also includes a new Calls app that combines Phone and FaceTime features into a customized experience. Messages, Camera, Photos and Music have also been tweaked for a simpler interface and they all have high contrast buttons, large text labels and tools that, according to Apple, “help trusted supporters to tailor the experience for the individual they support.” The goal is to offer a less intrusive or confusing system to those who might find the standard iOS interface overwhelming.
Apple also launched Live Speech this week, which works on iPhone, iPad and Mac. It will allow users to type what they want to say and have the device read it out loud. It is not only available for personal conversation, but also for Phone and FaceTime calls. You can also create shortcuts for phrases you use frequently, such as “Hi, can I have a tall vanilla latte?” or “Excuse me, where is the bathroom?” The company also introduced Personal Voice, which allows you to create a digital voice that sounds like your own. It may help those at risk of losing their ability to speak due to conditions that affect their voice. The setup process involves “reading along with random text prompts for about 15 minutes on an iPhone or iPad.”
For the visually impaired, Apple has added a new Point and Speak feature to the Magnifier viewing mode. It will use an iPhone or iPad’s camera, LiDAR scanner and on-device machine learning to understand where a person has placed their finger and scan the target area for words, before reading them to the user. For example, if you hold up your phone and point to different parts of a microwave or washing machine controls, the system will say what the labels are – like “Add 30 seconds,” “Defrost” or “Start.”
The company made several other small announcements this week, including updates that allow Macs to pair directly with Made-for-iPhone hearing devices, as well as phonetic suggestions for edit text with voice typing.
Google’s new accessibility tools
Meanwhile, Google introduced a new Visual Question and Answer (or VQA) tool in the Lookout app, which uses AI to answer follow-up questions about images. The company’s accessibility lead and senior director of Products For All Eve Andersson told Engadget in an interview that VQA is the result of a collaboration between inclusion and DeepMind teams.
To use VQA, you open Lookout and start Images mode to scan a photo. After the app tells you what’s in the scene, you can request follow-ups to get more details. For example, if Lookout says the image depicts a family having a picnic, you can ask what time of day it is or if there are trees around them. This allows the user to determine how much information they want from a photo, instead of being forced into an initial description.
Often, it’s difficult to know how much detail to include in an image description, as you want to provide enough to help but not so much that you overwhelm the user. For example, “What is the right amount of detail to provide our users with Lookout?” Andersson said. “You never know what they want.” Andersson added that AI can help determine the context of why someone is asking for a description or more information and provide the appropriate information.
When it launches in the fall, VQA can present a way for users to decide when to ask for more and when they’ve learned enough. Of course, since it is powered by AI, the generated data can be inaccurate, so there is no guarantee that this tool works perfectly, but it is an interesting method that puts the power in the hands of users.
Google is also expanding Live Captions to work in French, Italian and German later this year, as well as bringing wheelchair-friendly labels for places on Maps to more people around the world.
Microsoft, Samsung, Adobe and others
Several other companies had news to share this week, including Adobe, which launched a feature that uses AI to automate the process of creating tags for PDFs that will make them more reader-friendly. screen. It uses Adobe’s Sensei AI, and will also display the correct reading order. Because it speeds up the process of tagging PDFs, people and organizations can potentially use the tool to go through stockpiles of old documents to make it easier. Adobe also launched a PDF Accessibility Checker to “enable large organizations to quickly and efficiently evaluate the accessibility of existing PDFs at scale.”
Microsoft also has some small updates to share, especially around the Xbox. It adds new accessibility settings to the Xbox app on PC, including options to disable background images and disable animations, so users can reduce potentially distracting, confusing or trigger components. The company also expanded its support pages and added accessibility filters to its web store to make it easier to find optimized games.
Meanwhile, Samsung announced this week that it has added two new levels of sound settings around the Galaxy Buds 2 Pro, bringing the total number of options to five. This allows those who use the earbuds to listen to their surroundings to gain more control over how loud they want the sounds to be. They can also choose different settings for individual ears, as well as choose clarity levels and create customized profiles for their hearing.
We also know that Cisco, the company behind Webex video conferencing software, has partnered with speech recognition company VoiceITT to add transcriptions that better support people with non-standard speech. It builds on Webex’s existing live translation feature, and uses VoiceITT’s AI to familiarize itself with a person’s speech patterns to better understand what they want to say. Then, it builds and transcribes what is said, and captions appear in a chat bar during calls.
Finally, we also saw Mozilla announce that Firefox 113 will be more accessible by improving the screen reader experience, while Netflix unveiled a sizzle reel showing off some of the latest features and updates. development last year. In its announcement, Netflix said that although it is “taking steps towards accessibility, [it knows] there is always more work to be done.”
That sentiment is true not only for Netflix, or the tech industry alone, but also for the entire world. While it’s great to see so many companies taking the opportunity this week to release and highlight accessibility-minded features, it’s important to remember that inclusive design doesn’t have to and can’t be a one-off. a year’s effort. I’m also happy to see that despite the current enthusiasm around generative AI, most companies aren’t showing off the buzzword in every helpful feature or announcement this week without good reason. For example, Andersson said that “we often think about the needs of the user” and adopt a problem-first approach as opposed to focusing on determining where a certain type of technology can be used in a solution.
Although it is probably at least partially true that the announcements around GAAD are a bit of a PR and marketing game, ultimately some of the tools being launched today may improve the lives of people with disabilities or different needs. I call that a net win.
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