Apple today unveiled a slew of new accessibility features – that aid disabled people to manage their work and handle the surrounding environment better.
Features such as Assistive Access, Point and Speak, Personal Voice and Live Speech will arrive on eligible Apple devices later this year, which will let disabled users communicate and function better in their daily lives.
Apple’s New Accessibility Features
Responding to the feedback from disabled communities, Apple built a range of tools to aid this special category of people in their daily lives. One of these includes Assistive Access, which helps people with cognitive disabilities interact with others better.
When enabled, Assistive Access will make the interface easier to understand and navigate – by increasing the icon size, increasing contrast and clearer text labels. This feature even integrates the Phone and FaceTime apps for easier access.
Also, extending the functionality of the current Magnifier Tool, Apple brought in Point and Speak – a feature that uses the device’s LiDAR scanner to help visually disabled people hear text labels out loud. For example, users can point the device to a microwave or a signboard to learn about the symbols or texts better.
This feature is available in English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Cantonese, Korean, Japanese and Ukrainian. Aside from this, Apple also announced Personal Voice – similar to Acapela – that creates an automated voice that sounds like you, unlike Siri.
Aimed at people who may risk losing their vocal speaking ability from conditions like ALS, Personal Voice needs your input for about 15 minutes – reading randomly chosen text prompts to train their voice using machine learning and setting it as default. It’ll initially be available in English and for the devices with Apple Silicon only.
Finally, there’s Live Speech – which does text-to-speech translation and speaks out the result aloud. This can be accessed directly from the device’s lock screen and even integrated into other apps like FaceTime. And if there’s a need for repeating some phrases regularly, you can store them within Live Speech and use them later.
All these features are coming to Apple devices later this year.
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