Apple Previews Upcoming Accessibility Features and Enhancements, Including New VoiceOver Voices, Braille Upgrades, and Magnifier Reader Mode

The BSI, for me, is the most interesting of these. After playing with Android I'd say that IOS has fallen behind with the ease, convenience and reliability of BSI. Hopefully this will go some way to solving such issues.

I'm excited about iOS 18 and look forward to trying it when the betas are available.

I am curious how many people use some of the features Apple releases every year. Applevis should do one to see how many of us do so. Have 13 pro but never used door dictation or magnifying to get VO to tell us what it is.

Dear Apple,
No matter how many uncorrected VoiceOver bugs pile up against the blind who use IOS and MacOS, I am most sincerely glad to hear you are addressing the needs to the more severely disabled on Earth. Some of your accessibility improvements are and will be an enormous boon to those who use them. My hat is off to you. Bravo!

Or does anyone else think this compares poorly to all the other things which have been revolutionising accessibility out there recently?

The annual survey already covers everything. I am talking about the accessibility report thing. Don't recall what exactly it's called.

I wonder how many voiceover bugs we'll see this time both on mac and IOS? I wonder why apple can't just focus on fixing bugs instead on adding new features that will more than likely break the existing codebase? Sure bugs do get fixed but there are still a lot that hasn't been addressed for quite a while now and there gunna come a time when Voiceover is gunna need a complete over hall if it doesn't need it already! I'm gunna go off a bet and say that the existing code is a mess and has been for quite some time given the nature of bugs, and features combined over time. They keep adding things to said code instead of cleaning it up so that newer features can be added which is not, how you do things. It's also a great way of introducing bugs that shouldn't be there in the first place. I'd like to be wrong on all this though and if I ain't, I can safely say, I told ya so. However, some of these features, particularly one about BSI peaked my attention as that's my most way of typing on my phone. You saying I can have BSI as my default typing method when I go into the keyboard? Finally! That needed to be in there for a long time and they just now getting into adding this? Guess better late than never I suppose.

Bug fixes will come. They wouldn't be announced today. You have two options on June 10th either sign up for the developer beta or when the public beta is available use it and give feedback.

For me, the BSI stuff and the action button for detection mode are what I'm looking forward to. I upgraded to a pro expecting something new that uses the lidar sensor, but a super quick way to pull up detection mode for the stuff that is already there will be useful. Yes, you can four finger triple tap, but the action button will be much easier. Now if I could figure out how to actually make point and speak work. lol

New voices, meh. But I know this forum will have a field day with that since people are so particular about the voices they like. I do wonder what they mean by "flexible voice rotor" though.

Are the most underated feature and what I am the most excited for. The current keyboard layout is nothing than poor especially for those used to windows and it will be interesting to see how far we can customize them. Nothing about screen recognition on mac though which is sad but I guess it will slip through any of the apple ai thing anyway. This reminds me that, even if most of it is arguably marketing, we must remember that most of the blind users are vocal on this website but we are not the only category in the disabled people and what apple does, even on paper, is litterally more than every big tech out there currently. So good job apple. Fix voiceover at least a little bit, fix the calculator on macos and I'd be happy.
Most of my angryness to mac is because even the most trivial tasks seem near impossible to do such as text editing / formatting in Pages or for code but since I've found vscode being very usable... I am treuly able to leverage my mac now! Bad accessibility is still better than no accessibility at all, try anything other than gnome or mate on any of the linux distro with gui. Looking forward to see all of this.

What is it? Is it on a per app bases? inquiring minds want to know.

I'm well aware that bug fixes don't get announced in a release like this. That's not the point. I would love to join the dev beta rather than public beta however, as I only have one phone and nothing else, that may not happen this time around and I use my phone a lot for work so can't have that risk of things breaking when I don't want them to. Public beta is fine enough and I had no issues with that but I'd like to take a step further though. One of these days would love to have a device, simply for testing.

Thanks David and AppleVis team.

I've seen new features come and go. Very rarely do they significantly impact my productivity. And many new features have fallen into disrepair over the years, or never lived up to their initial promise, handoff being one memorable example. Consequently, it's hard for me to get too excited.

I think most Apple products would be at a very satisfactory level of accessibility if bugs and usability issues were addressed. A bug example would be Safari Not Responding. Usability issues include the VoiceOver contortions required for sidecar, iPadOS split view, or pretty much anything in Mac Garageband. This could easily be marketed if it were spun correctly. Early Apple ads that painted the Macintosh as easy to use were quite successful. I can imagine an Apple marketing campaign that touts how easy it is for marginalized demographics to use Apple products. Of course, they'd need to actually address the issues first.

The ability to customize keyboard shortcuts on Mac is intriguing. We currently have a confusing palette of keyboard shortcut options, each with their own limitations and esoteric configuration screens. If Apple has opted to clean up the present cornucopia and introduce a flexible and coherent redesign that follows a tools-not-rules philosophy, that would be a welcome change.

I'm unclear about the vocal shortcuts feature that will allow SIRI to complete complex tasks. Many leaks indicate SIRI will get an AI redesign so that it will understand general commands. If so, configuring a specific vocal shortcut seems moot. I'm unsure why this separate feature would be necessary.

Will old features be updated to take advantage of new features? For example, the iOS Measure app is pretty challenging for blind people to use, but I can imagine it being much easier if it were enhanced with the new AI capabilities that we keep hearing about. And I'm still waiting for Raise To Wake to become smart enough to not wake when it's being jostled in the pouch of my hoodie. If these old features will not be redesigned, that's a missed opportunity to improve products overall.

I hope we're bombarded with feel good videos of blind people doing incredible things, previously unimagined... Like surfing the web without launching ones mac through the nearest wall.

PS... Spell check is still broken in safari when typing into text boxes such as this one. Absolute jokers.

Just imagine, for the international day of disability Apple announces they've got off their high horses and fixed just one or two of the mirad broken aspects of voiceover on mac.

*Smash zoom into my smiling face*

Now that would be an ad.

I excited because I will be choose reading and writing Braille tables like it's possible to do with Jaws.
I can read and write in Hebrew but if I moove Braille table to write in English, i can't read in Hebrew.

I'm just seeing this now and have to comment. As always, it seems that the good folks out in Cupertino are at it again. This is fantastic. I'm curious as to whether or not this new reader mode for the magnifier will further help in aiming my phone correctly. In addition, I might be getting one or 2 hearing aids and am looking forward to trying out Apple's other hearing accommodations . I've tried out the background sounds on both my devices. It was recently discovered that I have Eustachian-tube dysfunction, and I'm getting another hearing test this weekend.

No. That one does not do a good job.

The new way to start BSI and stay in BSI starts very interesting.
Can't wait to beta test.

those features sound interesting. I cannot wait to test.

I'm intrigued by the changes mentioned for BSI. I've started exploring Android again, and their implementation of BSI is ahead of Apple's.

I am really excited to be able to change the default keyboard shortcuts on Mac, which you have been able to do since iOS 13.
I feel like every version of iOS, at least for the last couple of years, they’ve been adding new voices. in iOS 16, it was eloquence and the novelty voices. In 17, it was the US natural Siri voices that are a lot smaller in size.
What voices do you think they will be adding this year? More Siri voices? Maybe some new unseen and unheard of vocalizer voices? Older retro speech synthesizers? What are your thoughts?
Also, out of curiosity, if you could have any voiceover voice in the world, what would you choose and why?

I'm pretty sure these are new custom voices by Apple, I don't believe Cerence has anything new for Vocalizer at this point. I for one would welcome Apple getting back into the TTS game, Alex was the last big project they really worked on besides the stuff for Siri. If it's Vocalizer thats great as well, but I really hope they move away from that and start working on their own tech instead to catch up with Microsoft and Google.

It is still the best voice out there. I'm glad apple added it.

well,
I hope theyc an fix the current voice over issue first.
like some of the high quality voices is not really high quality!
and the siri voices will disappear when we charge our IPhone

They'll probably be the chat gpt voices.

"We went ahead and made it possible for you to hear "Safari Not Responding" in a range of new and highly realistic human sounding voices."

I will wait for the new voices for voiceOver user.

I would love to see something like this quality but from what I understand speech with this inflection and human like Quality is generated in away that wouldn't be great for on the fly kind of stuff

If the new, smaller Siri voices can synthesize speech on the go, why can the OpenAI voices not do the same on-device? It is unfair that the smaller Siri voices are only available for English and possibly not even all dialects of it, but they're not significantly less responsive than the Vocalizer voices or the large Siri voices.

Because, I think, the audio is compiled, like an MP3 or similar is created to play back the voice. A screen reader is instantly reactive but can't add in all the AI inflections as it has no understanding of the text it is reading. I think they are two different things. I'm not sure if I'd want too much inflection when I'm just typing, or navigating my mac/iPhone anyway. When it comes to documents, however, I'm hoping they will allow for a more AI driven way of reading long form.

If you try Eleven Labs, and everyone should, it's bonkers good, there is a period of compilation time. It will get faster I'm sure, but I think the navigation voice needs to be responsive, the reading voice is the one we want upgrading to sounding like David Attenborough.

The new AI-powered Siri voices will also have to synthesize speech "instantly", and the US English voices already do that and are quite responsive indeed. This is what I'm trying to say. The new Siri voices are different from the large ones in the sense that they don't directly make use of hundreds of megabytes of data created out of recording snippets and instead synthesize speech in real time.

I'm always intrigued to try out new voices, and this year is no exception. I'm currently using Alex on my Mac, and I switched to Matilda just a bit ago on my iPhone. I believe I've heard several of the voices from Eleven Labs, and they sound fabulous. Drew sounds like David Letterman to me. Having said all that, I'm happy with the voices that are currently available and it's cool that they can also serve as Siri's voice. The Per-Voice settings which were added are great, and I hope Apple expands them because it seems there are a few voices that don't have this. In addition, TruVoice would be neat. I used those under Windows, and one of the females has my mother's first name. I'm not saying which she is, but the fact that she and my mother share the same name is very sweet.

I'm surprised how much that extra step to do BSI on iOS every time still irks me. It shouldn't bug me so much to just do one rotor gesture and get to my BSI on the top of that silly thing but it really, really does. meanwhile on android I just double tap the edit field and it's right there. I know it realistically doesn't add that much time on the I devices but that matters to me way more than seems logical.

in his latest video on youtube. This gives us more visibility than ever in public, plus there are a handful of voiceover users in the comments there, I guess most of them knows applevis as well.

I'll be happier than ever. Unlikely though but I can hope!

Perhaps it will let us add some voice-specific parameters to the rotor actions?