Apple Previews Upcoming Accessibility Features and Enhancements, Including Point and Speak and More Natural, Expressive Siri Voices for VoiceOver Users

These features both sound incredibly interesting to me, Point and speak for obvious reasons but Live Speech suggests they are moving toward some kind of on device neural engine speech production. This could hopefully spill over into new voices for Voiceover and Siri. I’m less interested in creating a TTS of my voice but very excited Apple are back to innovating in this area. TBH they didn’t announce the single feature that would have got me most excited which would be fixing the bugs. Please Apple if anyone from the accessibility team is reading these comments, I’m literally begging. Please can you put significant resource into fixing the bugs. So many of us are so absolutely depressingly beaten by them. They are ruining our devices and therefore our ability to do things.

I can’t use points of speak, until I get an Io device with lighter scanner.
Live speech would be interesting to play around with, and even though I don’t have a hearing disability, it might be good in the future. My hearing doctor say that because of my Eye condition, Norris disease, there is an extreme possible chance I could become Jeff in the Matthew chat
Ask for a personal voice, that sounds amazing. Maybe I could snap, AI, clips of Trump, Obama, Biden, and other AI voices, and put them into VoiceOver.
as for the new Siri improvements, that is excellent.
No, I can make Siri faster.
Next feature, I hope, is the option to use other VoiceOver voices like Alek or eloquence, Alex, or even the singing voices, LOL. Imagine those singing voices reading out the time for Siri and reading out my messages.
That would really make people laugh.

These upcoming features sound very cool, pun literally intended. Regarding Braille on Apple products, I still haven't managed to get everything up and running on my eReader but that is on my to-do list. The feature that will let people record their own voice for loved ones to hear is going to be another game-changer inandof itself. Things like this are what make me proud to be an Apple customer!

Once again Apple throw people a nice and juicy bone and people waggle their tail, they did it to them with eloquence and people were so happy. I want for the money I pay for my 13 pro that voiceover bugs are address, fix issues with pronunciation with Alex, address issues with Braille that those who use it have. There are more to list but I am sure Applevis will get Sarah to come and talk about how wonderful apple is and those in the apple will prey to the sky with glory, glory to apple. Before you jump on me, I had used iPhone since iPhone 4, 4s, 5, 7, xs, 11 pro max, 12 pro, and 13 pro. I also using iPad 9 and my series 7. I purchased my devices and no one gave them to me. I spend my money on it. At this time android is not that accessible compared to iPhones. I only ask that apple focus their time on bugs and making voiceover more responsive to us instead of adding new features. I asked Bella the cat her thoughts, she responded "meow, meow and eow. I am not sure I want to know what she said.

Dear Apple,

I really do love your new features. Big happy smile. Your innovations are amazing! And they are really helping people who really need help. There only one thing.

For the love of God, would you please kill the bugs! I totally agree with Andy Lane. The bugs present in IOS 16.4.1 (and earlier versions that are still present) are destroying the usefulness of my iPhone, and believe me, I use my iPhone all the time, now not because it's so useful but because it takes all the time to get the stupid thing to be of use!

Thank you, Apple. Big happy smile. Your new stuff is great. Scowl. The bugs suck.

Bruce

The live speech and new Siri voices sound interesting. I wouldn't enjoy using my own voice for voiceover. Point and speak is also interesting but looks like I will need to do an upgrade from the 12.

I know there's nothing we can do, apart from emailing apple and hoping for the best, but as I said in another comment, I'm not impressed.

I'm sure some of these features will help people with disabilities but they really need to start fixing bugs before adding new stuff that will probably break.

I have been using my IOS device for a long time now. I personally have not experienced many bugs. What bugs are you experiencing?

Apple is on a race to see who has more bugs NY or Apple. NY have bed bugs and apple have VO bugs. Both are bad.

You make an interesting point about the personal voice feature and possibilities. As a medical lawyer I am concerned about the impact this might have on our ideas relating to personhood. Essentially, personhood is not really the same as being alive. Your body can be biologically alive without your having the degree of cognitive and psychological continuity that you once had. The extent of continuity required for personhood is contentious but most theories agree that there needs to be some degree of this. The expression that X or Y has 'become a different person' since A or B happened might well be a colloquialism, but actually it captures the essence of the problem quite well. Suppose that X has dimentia or some such degenerative illness, and suppose he preserves his voice using Apple's personal voice feature, coupled with the AI capabilities you talk about to analyse his conversations and in effect, generate an AI-generated X that has learnt how to be the biological X. now suppose the biological X is so ill that he loses what psychological continuity he formerly had - or, to put it another way, he loses his sense of self. now, suppose we get to the point where the biological X is still alive but the AI-generated X thinks, talks, reacts like X to a significantly greater extent than the biological X does. Towards which X do we feel greater affinity? Which X do we like better? Can the AI-generated X make decisions about what the biological X would have wanted, supposedly on the biological X's behalf? Does the biological X become a diferent person or, even worse, not a person at all? This is one that, seriously, I believe the judges of the Court of Protection in the not too distant future might have to grapple with.

in the meantime, it's good to see the changes for those with speech difficulties. Granted I'm not one of them, but let another disability have a keynote moment in the sun. I hope it works for the people who depend on it. Nothing that exciting for blindies but over on another thread that's pretty much what we're asking for. Fix the bugs and don't worry about aught else. Well, looks like we have half of that. Bingo looks forward to the other half.

PS: Yeah yeah - I know about Siri voices. They'll probably be all american anyway: they usualy are.

First Apple does more than any other company for accessibility!!!! Second YOU haven't seen iOS 17 so how do you know that the bugs aren't killed?

This is the actual issue I have with Apple. If there is a bug, it will only be on some iPhones, and often the bugs will be randomly occurring and impossible to catch with the screen recording the Apple accessibility team seems to want as proof of an issue lately.
Meanwhile, there are other iPhones that are apparently bug free, therefore no bugs exist. Or that is how it comes across from the outside.
I'm not a computer programmer, nor a hardware engineer. I'm probably not even calling them the correct titles. But I know when my phone is doing weird things, like losing focus over, and over, after I've updated it. I also know when I'm getting frustrated at being pushed and told I should update to a new version that lots of people are reporting has a horrible focus bug because of security issues. It leads me to use my iPhone just about only to check the time on the lock screen and answer phone calls.

Bella the cat is proud for you. It does not change that bugs and bugs are with VO. Now you are going to say, all OS have bugs!!! That was not an answer by the way. Microsoft does the sane with support and address issues but they are not perfect. Bugs I do not want them and Bella the cat does not like them either.

Who cares what your cat wants or likes. All operating systems have bugs.

Sad picking on a cat. How low. Well check below for 9to5 talk about this. Not bella but the new features.
New Live Speech, Personal Voice and Point & Speak Features for iOS 17 | What You Need To Know!

There is no link.

You ask what bugs I've been experiencing. The worst is VoiceOver seemingly resetting itself every few seconds or minutes, resulting in focus going to the top of the screen. Imagine what it's like to try to read a news article, for example, but every few seconds focus goes to the top? Then you have to hunt for where you left off? And back to the top you go, before you find it? Or after a few seconds more reading once you did find it?

Now, imagine you're in Safari, going through a google search page, hunting. Bang! VoiceOVER RESETS. Back to the top you go! Where did you get interrupted? Well, you don't know. You have to hunt for it, and maybe while you're hunting or maybe once you've found it and you continue hunting, bang! Back to the top you go!

Paras, you have every reason to count yourself fortunate if you do not have this bug.

You always seem to include your cat and everything. If your cat likes you so much, create an account on here for it. You will need it!

I didn't expect to see this until later in the week. The new announcements sound kind of interesting, but not enough to make me run out and upgrade to a 14 pro. The demo use case they showed for the new point and speak thing, sounds like it will be a lot more complicated to make work reliably. It sounds like you would have to hold your phone in one hand and try to focus it, while touching the buttons on the microwave with the other, which does not sound easy given that the pro iPhones are heavier. My initial enthusiasm dropped after an admittedly brief play with door detection last year.

I hope these new features don't end up sherlocking a bunch of other apps, although I don't think that will happen. I usually like using Apple apps, but I find myself going to something like Seeing AI rather than trying to use text detection in the camera app. Options are a good thing!

This forum is just like any other Apple enthusiast forum; half the people want Apple to do nothing but fix bugs and call it iOS 17, but then the other half will complain that iOS has become boring and that they "can't inovate anymore" Phil Shiller's ***. I don't know which side of the fence I fall on, but I do agree that a lot of clean up needs to happen.

I also agree with an above post; not every new accessibility feature has to be about us. Perhaps that personalized voice thing is that community's VO activities or Braille screen input or wider choice of TTS voices.

If you are happy with the current state of VO then thats great for you. Maybe you don’t have the bugs, maybe you have enough vision that they aren’t an inconvenience and maybe you are more tolerant and patient and some of us. I find the bugs highly annoying which becomes highly depressing over time and as I’ve taken the time to understand what could be going on for you that they don’t bother you, perhaps you’d want to try and understand why they might for some of us. An example beautifully illustrated above is the focus jumping. I have no vision which means every minute or less sometimes I have to find where I was. Sometimes I don’t even get back to where I was meant to be before boom it happens again. While typing this message the focus has gone to the preview button at least 8 times requiring me to find this box again. When I read anything with social media api’s I can’t get past them, embedded video. Nope can’t get past it and often can’t play it. If the box for GDPR pops up or any other box that I can’t find or didn’t hear pop up then the entire site behaves badly until I realise or stumble across the button to accept cookies. If I try to reply on YouTube and theres no send reply button after I’ve typed out a well thought through reply. If I want to write or edit a text document but can’t because the cursor is all over the place and doesn’t speak random parts of the text. If I try to buy anything online and some of the controls can’t be interacted with. If I answer the phone and VO won’t talk until I reset it. How about connecting a Bluetooth speaker and having my ear blown off with VO volume slamming itself to full while I have it quietly next to my ear. What about all the other bugs that I can’t even remember or make everyone suffer through in a over long comment that just make me want to not bother using my device that I’ve paid over £1000 for in an echo system I have spent almost £50k on in the last 15 years. Yeh there are problems, If you aren’t having them then honestly thats great but some are and they are affecting our ability to use our devices and subsequently our lives. Wow that ended up being mostly for Dennis but Paris, these are some of the bugs we are having to deal with.

I find that if you tap a bit lower on the screen it sometimes gets you past those bits and the same thing works for adds.

I'm not experiencing that many bugs iether, just the stopping speech thing really so I'll see what IOS 17 brings to the table.

if my phone doesn't support it then I won't care about it until I'm forced to upgrade.

Cheers for the advice. I usually do try something like that but the problem is at the very least, I’ve lost the thread of what I was listening to and concentrating on and at worse I just give up because I often can’t make the end match the beginning and don’t know how much I’ve missed. I think if this had a happened once or 10 times I’d think very differently to where I am with it now.

Sometimes when I paste a link does not show up. Copy it and open YouTube and paste and search. Is by 9to5. Also for Dominic regarding Bella the cat, you can skipt it and not read it. I am sure she would not care. I just want apple to focus on bugs and all those who are having bad experiences want the sane. Sane with Braille. I do not use it but many do. Long live the Apple.

The one basic thing we expect a screen reader to do is to read what is on the screen.

Having VO start reading down an article in Apple's own News app and then suddenly randomly stop at links or other breaks in the text is not only irritating, but should be unacceptable for any screen reader.

But that isn't even as annoying as the bug that occurs when VO just goes off into the weeds for a long time or until restarted and there is no feedback at all for the blind user. Is that a screen reder?

Also, note the various threads in AppleVis that talk about problems with simply reading a text document with VO by arrowing up and down lines, selecting/highlighting text, etc. That has never been reliable for me using a bluetooth keyboard. How can a blind person get a feel for exactly what is on the screen or how it is formatted when VO feedback is irratic at best, and sometimes just wrong?

Yes, it is nice that Apple keeps introducing new accessibility features, but if the bugs in the basic features remain, it makes it not only less enjoyable to use our devices, but less reliable.

Hope some of these bugs can be squashed in iOS 17, but if the past is any indicator, we will continue to have to live with these issues.

I do understand that all modern programs and operating systems have bugs, but at least make the experience for blind users as good and reliable as it is for sighted users.

--Pete

In my experience, newer devices have less bugs. I have not experienced any focus issues in Safari. On an older Mac, sometimes, voiceover would say bizzy, but not major issues on IOS.

Wow, you are very lucky indeed. I am using a 14 pro max and safari crashes almost constantly. Every minute is good going and each time it does, I lose focus and start back at the top or even another random place. The preview button on this page for example. Perfectly timed, it just happened then and another twice to get to here. Lol. It’s not fun at all.

Can you all give some examples where you are seeing issues? The name of a webpage and link would be good. No beta software. Thanks for me, the experience has been fairly good.

Did you contact apple accessibility and do a screen share?

I think the personal speech is the features let us record our voice for the voice over voices right?

My current understanding of personal voice is that the voice you create won't be supported as a VoiceOver voice.

These are interesting features. A lot of the new features aren't specifically made for the blind, but I'm really happy. When other peole with disabilities can move mor independently through their world, we all are elevated. Also, some of these bugs people are complaining about aren't bugs, but quirks in the voice, or synthesis engine apple is using. Also, sometimes the reason VoiceOver sometimes jumps focus in certain situations is because the screen refreshed or something was loading.

I don't know if I'm alone here, all I want from iOS 18 is a really decent AI voice so I can read Kindle books with greater enjoyment. I don't care about wallpapers, I don't care about sticky notes or spinning UI elements or yet another way of achieving something you already do by a current satisfactory means, I just want to be able to read a Kindle book with an AI voice which is hard to distinguish from a human reader. Oh yes, it would be nice if Apple Fixed so many of those voiceover bugs that we've had to put up with in iOS 17.

Fun stuff. With each such announcement, I get more and more excited about WWDC.

To create a personal voice, it sounds like the user must read text displayed on the screen. I wonder how someone totally blind might accomplish this. As a writer who occasionally does public readings of my own work, I find that I must rehearse multiple times, using VoiceOver as a prompter, and still I'm dissatisfied with the results.

Someone above mentioned that Personal Voice would not be usable as a VoiceOver voice. From an engineering perspective, this seems innefficient. Apple doesn't have a special purpose machine learning API for every AI application, or a special purpose rendering library for every rendering application. But they seem to have special purpose text-to-speech solutions for every application that needs to talk. The result is more code, greater memory usage, and inconsistency in features, capabilities, and issues.

Unless Apple ads more Siri voices, do ya see Apple partnering up with Eleven Labs in some way?
An example on the Android side of things, can be found here:
https://accessibleandroid.com/elevenlabs-api-support-in-reader-apps-the-ultimate-reading-experience-can-now-be-possible/

On that note, even Siri voices could use better inflection.

If Tru Voice on Windows and DecTalk can do it, why can't Apples on voices?

What I just want that apple on accessibility day focus on fixing bugs. Just fix bugs and most of us would be happy. Prefer that over a feature that most will not even use. Still still had not use any of them yet.had not use .

I believe they sited security and privacy as the reason personal voice hasn't come to other applications. The danger being someone could clone your voice and get up to all sorts of mischief with it. I'm guessing this could still be done with the current version, but it would be harder.

Great point about the kindle books though. It would, I fear, make audio book narrators a thing of the past though which would suck.

My fear with apple and AI is that they are going to move too slowly. They've always been behind the curve choosing to do things well instead of do things fast but I'm not sure that playbook is going to fly here. They failed with siri, and unless they have some really deep integration with their OS, being able to do pretty much everything hands off and eyes free, they're already losing. Open AI will release their device and it could be game over for bloated fiddly OS.

It is totally possible for VoiceOver users like me and others posting on here to make a personal voice, and I am one of those who have already created their own.

I went through the process several times actually to get the best recording possible. It is just as someone suggested above. You listen to voiceover speak the phrase and then speak it into a microphone. Pretty simple. All you must do is ensure the microphone does not hear what voiceover is reading

Am I correct in thinking you can only use it for very limited tasks and preset phrases, the idea being it is a replacement for those who have lost the ability to speak?

You can use your personal voice during calls and even bring up the keyboard by enabling Live Speech and selecting the newly-added option from the list that appears when you activate the accessibility shortcut.