Recently, Apple announced that it will launch new accessibility features later this year. This will lead to a better accessibility experience.
The official information also describes these accessibility features:
Including eye tracking, musical haptics, vocal shortcuts, vehicle motion cues, and more, visionOS will provide even more accessibility features.
It is reported that AI-powered eye tracking gives users the built-in option to use iPads and iPhones with just their eyes. Eye tracking is a feature designed for users with disabilities to set up and calibrate the front-facing camera in seconds, with on-device machine learning.
Eye tracking works in iPadOS and iOS apps and requires no additional hardware or accessories.
With eye tracking, users can navigate through the app's elements and use dwell controls to activate each element, accessing other features such as physical buttons, swipes, and other gestures only through their eyes.
Musical haptics are a way for hearing-impaired users to experience music on their iPhones.
When this accessibility feature is turned on, the haptic engine in iPhone embody taps, textures, and subtle vibrations as music plays. Music Haptics is available for songs in Apple Music and will be available as an API for developers.
iPhone and iPad users can use voice shortcuts to add custom utterances to Siri to launch shortcuts and complete complex tasks.
The Listen to Atypical Speech feature provides the option to enhance the range of speech recognition. The feature uses on-device machine learning to identify a user's speech patterns.
Designed for users who have had an impact on speech due to cerebral palsy, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) or stroke, these features build on the features introduced in iOS 17 and provide new personalization and control features for users who are unable to speak or at risk of speaking ability.
Vehicle Motion Alerts is a new feature for iPhone and iPad that helps riders reduce motion sickness.
This feature displays animated dots at the edges of the screen to represent changes in vehicle motion to help reduce sensory clashes without interfering with the main display. Using the built-in sensors on iPhone and iPad, vehicle motion alerts can recognize whether a user is in a moving vehicle and respond accordingly.
The feature can be set to appear automatically on your iPhone or turned on and off in the Control Center.
visionOS will also bring a number of accessibility upgrades.
Starting this year, system-wide live captioning will be available to help all users, including those with hearing loss, understand conversations and conversations in app audio in real time.
Vision Pro will add the ability to move captions using the window bar to Apple's immersive videos, as well as support for other Made for iPhone (MFi) hearing aids and cochlear hearing processors.
Updates to visual accessibility will include the addition of "Reduce Transparency", "Smart Invert", and "Reduce Flickering Lights" features for users with low vision or who want to avoid bright lights and frequent flashing.
Other updates include VoiceOver, Magnifier, Braille Screen Input, Braille Keyboard, Hover Input, Personal Voice, Live Voice, Virtual Trackpad, Switch Controls, Voice Control, and more.