I wish more companies focused on how they can help humans instead of replacing us or squeezing us as hard as possible in the name of productivity.
My experience is limited to my elderly parents who have trouble seeing. With the text size Apple allows them to set it to, their phones are unreadable. Text runs off the screen in every app, 1st and 3rd party.
In their bill example, the user is told to confirm with the provider. Why not offer to call the number on the bill? Instead of telling them to use text detection, do it for them? Presumably Apple Intelligence would already have that capability. I’m afraid this will be a gimmick at best.
EDIT: Forgot to mention, the grip is good to see. Hopefully they don’t charge the apple tax on it.
Even better, fire up Orca (or whatever screenreader application your OS comes with) yourself and try to use your computer while shutting your eyes, kind of eye-opening (no pun intended) what kind of experience these sort of users typically get. And also, you quickly start to understand why they set the speech rate for their voice synthesizer to be so fast, it's almost unbearable navigating applications (and particularly lists) otherwise.
my go to example of this is this talk by Saqib Shaikh (a blind software engineer at Microsoft) giving a talk about Visual Studio. Link is timestamped
People talk a lot about how MacOS has gone downhill but I feel like it would have been a good start if developers could continue to patch over Apple's shortcomings like they used to be able to.
Totally aware that plenty of HN commenters are very glad that Apple keeps this locked down. I'm just the other opinion, that's all.
I think the trap in creating anything is doing it for a crowd. Art, software, anything... it turns out better when it is made with a specific, named individual in-mind.
Accessibility features are almost always championed and field-tested with one specific loved one in mind and I think that's what keeps the technical solutions personable and grounded.
runeks•27m ago
1. Use AI to determine how much a bill is for
2. Call up the people who billed you and ask them how much they billed you
3. Pay billed amount
tramc•18m ago
Someone•5m ago