By Shelly Brisbin

June 26, 2023 3:59 PM PT

Vision Pro accessibility: Great potential, but many unknowns

Note: This story has not been updated since 2023.

The Apple Vision Pro announcement was not focused on accessibility, but the product will definitely be accessible to people with disabilities. Existing technologies like VoiceOver and Dwell Control will be integral to the way people with disabilities use the product. Apple is bringing an astonishing number of accessibility features found on other platforms to the headset.

There. That’s sorted.

For most observers, Apple’s WWDC sessions about how to build accessible apps for the headset is as far as they feel the need to go. It’s accessible. Apple has once again considered the needs of users who interact with their tech differently than most do.

It’s true… but there is a lot more to say, even many months before the headset ships. And more to say about who is excited for the device and how it can actually enhance accessibility of the world in which it finds itself. There are also a lot of understandable unknowns about whether the user experience might tempt a specific person with a disability to part with $3500, come 2024.

Biggest potential

The interaction method at the heart of Vision Pro and visionOS is eye gaze—interacting with an item onscreen by looking at it, rather than touching or clicking it to gain focus. That’s a method of interaction already familiar to people with disabilities who don’t use touch gestures or handheld input devices and trackpads to interact with their phones or computers. In many cases, an eye blink or a mouth stick are used to act on the focused item, when users can’t touch a screen or input device.

Eye gaze access is available in some, but not all contexts on Apple platforms. So Vision Pro potentially offers a better experience to someone who uses their eyes to scroll or select things onscreen. In this way Vision Pro could be the most accessible Apple platform yet for someone with motor disabilities like cerebral palsy or quadriplegia that prevents or limits the use of one’s hands. We’ll need to learn more about potential input methods for this community, but Vision Pro could be a game changer.

Head-mounted theater

Lots of people have assumed that I, a person with low-vision, must be incredibly excited about using Vision Pro. After all, content will be close to my eyes, where it needs it to be before I can see it fully. No need to sit super close to a TV or use magnification devices as I sometimes do today. The movie or show is right there, just in front of my eyeballs. And like Apple TV, audio description will be available to catch what I don’t when the content has been described, as it is on Apple TV+. True enough. If there’s one thing I’ll personally benefit from when I eventually strap a Vision Pro to my head, it’s consuming entertainment.

But it’s unclear to me at the moment how using Vision Pro as a computer—gazing at a specific item in order to act on it—will work for me. Will the promised support for Dynamic Type, zooming, and bolded text be enough to make getting work done on the headset possible? I really don’t know. Depends on how zooming in on the screen changes/shrinks the amount of information available—how flexible the “Finder” of Vision Pro is, visually. And I’m doubtful I personally can rely on eye gaze to focus in on particular items. I might need to rely on the VoiceOver screen reader to a greater degree than I do with iOS.

I’m sure there will be alternatives that allow me to use the Vision Pro, but the question for me, and for blind users, too—many of whom are already excited about the platform—is whether the device will give enough of an upgraded experience to make it worth seriously considering it as an alternative to a Mac or an iOS device when I’m doing anything beyond watching a movie or playing a game.

Dream scenarios

Like everyone who loves technology, those of us with disabilities dream about things we might do with a brand-new product that are better than we can right now. When Apple’s wearable-device rumors centered on a pair of glasses, rather than a set of goggles, many or us hoped we’d be able to use the wearable as a navigation aid. We already have human- and AI-driven tools on iOS that allow us to navigate our environment, identify objects and people and read text we find on sings or documents. And specialty accessibility devices from Orcam and Envision, with four-digit price tags, already fulfill some of this promise, as do a handful of really cool iOS apps. Vision Pro includes 12 cameras, LIDAR, text recognition and a number of other features it would need to become a navigation aid for blind people.

But third party apps won’t have access to the camera, and the size, weight and battery requirements – not to mention the aesthetics –of version 1 of the headset seem to indicate it’s not intended to be used for travel.

Many have already imagined games and other immersive experiences they could enjoy on Vision Pro. And some people with disabilities seem to be taking for granted that developers will go that extra mile to support alternative display and input methods offered up by visionOS, not to mention building custom apps with audio-first content.

I’m cautiously hopeful here, because while many iOS and macOS developers have prioritized accessibility, others, particularly in the gaming and entertainment world, have not. And it seems that from what Apple has shared so far, providing accessibility in visionOS apps will need to be even more intentional. At a price point that limits the initial user base of the headset quite a bit, convincing developers to do the work of bringing full accessibility to their apps will be even more important than it has been to date. It takes time and intention, and users will need to be able to encourage developers to understand that the learning and work involved to become accessible is worth it.

[Shelly Brisbin is a radio producer and author of the book iOS Access for All. She's the host of Lions, Towers & Shields, a podcast about classic movies, on The Incomparable network.]

By Dan Moren

June 22, 2023 11:31 AM PT

iOS 17’s Live Voicemail finally makes this iOS 13 feature useful for me

Note: This story has not been updated since 2023.

Some software features have a delayed impact, like the clap of thunder reaching you seconds after a lightning strike. They may not be useful right away, but at some point something comes along that makes you realize that they’re just what you needed.

For example, take Apple’s introduction of Live Voicemail in iOS 17. Not only is this technologically impressive feature—which uses your phone to answer incoming calls and transcribe the voicemail being left as it happens—handy in and of itself, but it actually reverberates backwards through time to make an older iOS feature more useful.

Because Live Voicemail finally means I can turn on another feature that I’ve been tempted to use since iOS 13: Silence Unknown Callers.¹

I’ve always been reticent to turn on Silence Unknown Callers because I worry too much about missing important calls. There are simply too many times that I get a call I don’t want to miss from, say, a doctor’s office, or a delivery person, or a contractor. Let’s be frank: I’m not going to add all these people to my contact list. And in some cases, even if I do have them in my contacts—the urgent care line in my child’s pediatrician’s office comes to mind—a call doesn’t always come from the same number.

But in iOS 17, if you have Silence Unknown Callers active, callers with unrecognized numbers will go straight to Live Voicemail, allowing you to decide whether or not to pick up. (Meanwhile, numbers that are already marked as spam by, say, your carrier, won’t even trigger this.) For those of us old enough to remember answering machines, it’s the equivalent of screening your calls. It helps insure that you can still get the benefit of not having to answer every call while not ending up playing phone tag with that one person you’ve been trying to catch.

[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors, as well as an author, podcaster, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His next novel, the sci-fi adventure Eternity's Tomb, will be released in November 2026.]

By Dan Moren

June 20, 2023 1:52 PM PT

Apple adds passkeys to Apple ID, iCloud logins

Note: This story has not been updated since 2023.

As our resident passkey beat editor, I was glad to see that Apple has now added the ability to log in to your Apple ID or iCloud.com using a passkey instead of your password. The feature’s been rolling out today, and can be tested on devices running the iOS/iPadOS 17 or macOS Sonoma betas.¹

Using this feature on iOS/iPadOS is pretty straightforward: when you go to an Apple website that requires your Apple ID to login, including iCloud.com, the Apple Developer site, or the Apple ID management site, you’ll be asked if you want to sign in and authenticate with Face ID.

On the Mac side, when you enter your Apple ID in a browser, you’ll see a new option to Sign in with iPhone. Clicking this will bring up a QR code that you can scan with an iPhone or iPad, which will in turn authenticate you with Face ID on that device, and then log in on the Mac. I’ve confirmed that it works not only in Safari, but in Chrome on macOS Sonoma as well.

I do find it a little bit odd that the macOS implementation currently doesn’t seem to let you use Touch ID on your Mac to log in, rather kicking you to verify via your mobile device. On the one hand, that does bestow the additional security of using a second factor—an item that you have—but that’s not required on iOS or iPadOS, which would seem to be at more risk of being lost or stolen.

Another interesting tidbit: I can’t locate the saved passkey in the Passwords section of System Settings on my MacBook Air running Sonoma. This suggests it’s not synced between your devices, but perhaps using a distinct passkey generated on each iOS device. Neither is there an option right now to add such a passkey to a third-party password manager, like 1Password.

I also did test and was able to confirm that failing the Face ID authentication multiple times² will revert to the device’s passcode, so it doesn’t add any additional security for those worried about someone with their passcode gaining access (or changing) their Apple ID details.

It’s certainly good that Apple is eating its own dog food here, given how much they’ve pushed passkeys, even if the implementation does seem a bit odd.³ While this may not provide as much additional security as the hardware security key support added earlier this year, it’s decidedly easier to use.

[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors, as well as an author, podcaster, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His next novel, the sci-fi adventure Eternity's Tomb, will be released in November 2026.]

By Jason Snell

June 16, 2023 3:07 PM PT

WWDC 2023: More responsive iOS camera apps

Note: This story has not been updated since 2023.

Usually WWDC week is for new OS features. But this year, WWDC was stuffed full of new Macs and an entirely new Apple platform, so I’m slowly digging out of that and starting to dig into the new OS features announced last week. In the “Create a More Responsive Camera Experience” video, there are some exciting new features that should improve the experience of taking iPhone photos.

A lot of the secret sauce Apple uses to generate iPhone photos involves taking multiple images and then fusing them together. The most high-profile of these features is Deep Fusion (often jokingly referred to as “sweater mode,” referring to Apple’s demo images of detailed images of the weave in a sweater). Deep Fusion can generate great results, but it takes time to run. If you take a Deep Fusion photo, you may end up having to wait before taking your next shot—and you might miss something great in the meantime.

In iOS 17, a new deferred photo processing feature allows camera apps to push off image processing until after your camera session is complete. The result is that the shutter button becomes active almost immediately, so you can take more pictures—which is a good thing. The system saves a temporary, unprocessed image to your photo library as a placeholder, and when your phone is no longer busily shooting photos, it will fuse the image captures in the background and then replace the proxy with a full-fledged Deep Fusion photo.

The other update to camera-capture features in iOS 17 is designed to reduce shutter lag, which is the unfortunate effect where your camera captures an image a few fractions of a second after you pressed the shutter button. The iPhone camera is capturing images at 30 frames per second and can use multiple images to fuse together something nice, but it can’t go back in time—or can it? In fact, in iOS 17 the camera buffer can capture all the time during a shooting session, so when you press the shutter, it is able to capture the moment you intended—and use previous frames to help generate the final images, not just future ones. The result, according to Apple, is true “zero shutter lag.”

The iOS 17 responsive capture and fast capture features will work on iPhones with an A12 Bionic chip or newer.