Hey guys, it’s Greg with Apple Explained, and today we’re going to explore the history
of Apple accessibility, a topic which doesn’t get nearly the amount of attention that it
deserves, but that hasn’t kept Apple from pioneering some of the most life-changing
accessibility features. This topic was the third place winner of last weeks voting poll
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in the description. So you may have heard the word “accessibility”
before, but what does it mean exactly? Well the word itself refers to how easily something
can be obtained or used. And when considering technology, accessibility is extremely important.
Part of the reason why the iPhone has been so successful is because its technology is
easily accessible to anyone. Its straightforward touchscreen interface makes interaction feel
natural and intuitive. The Blackberry on the other hand, wasn’t so accessible, and suffered
a terrible fate. So it’s easy to recognize how accessible or inaccessible products are
in our daily life, but what if we took this a step further? If your vision or hearing
was impaired, that suddenly makes certain products much less accessible. And Apple’s
response to those challenges is what we’ll be covering in this video.
According to the US census, 40 million Americans lived with a disability in 2015, that’s
almost 13% of the population. And disabled Americans are less likely to use technology,
with about 23% saying they never go online, compared to 8% of the general population.
But this statistic may have been even higher if not for Apple’s efforts in making their
products as accessible as possible. In iOS 3, Apple introduced one of the most revolutionary
accessibility features called VoiceOver, the world’s first gesture-based screen reader.
It let visually impaired users touch the screen to hear a description of the item under their
finger.
But VoiceOver wasn’t Apple's first entry into assistive technology: Mac OS 10.2 Jaguar
introduced Universal Access which provided customizations to the operating system for
those with visual, hearing, and physical disabilities. In fact, Mac OS X Universal Access was influenced
by similar technologies which were bundled with the classic Macintosh operating system.
So clearly Apple has been dedicated to making their products accessible to everyone since
the early days, and that’s because of one man in particular: Steve Jobs. Even Stevie
Wonder gave Jobs a shout out for his dedication to accessibility in 2011, he said, ”I want
you all to give a hand to someone that you know whose health is very bad at this time.
His company took the challenge in making his technology accessible to everyone. In the
spirit of caring and moving the world forward, Steve Jobs.”
So clearly accessibility was a priority under Jobs leadership, and when Tim Cook was given
the reins at Apple in 2011, that didn’t change at all. During an award acceptance
speech in 2013 at Auburn University, Cook said, "People with disabilities often find
themselves in a struggle to have their human dignity acknowledged. They frequently are
left in the shadows of technological advancements that are a source of empowerment and attainment
for others. As much as Apple's engineers push back against this unacceptable reality, they
go to extraordinary lengths to make our products accessible to people with various disabilities
from blindness and deafness to various muscular disorders. We design our products to surprise
and delight everyone who uses them, and we never, ever analyze the return on investment.
We do it because it is just and right, and that is what respect for human dignity requires,
and it's a part of Apple I'm especially proud of."
And those remarks shouldn’t surprise you if you watched my History of Tim Cook video
where I explained that he considers himself a human rights activist. And his efforts have
been recognized by groups like the National Federation of the Blind in 2014 whose president
said, “Apple has done more for accessibility than any other company to date.”
So what exactly has Apple been doing to make their products so much more accessible? Well
just take a look at the extensive accessibility section of their website, and you’ll get
a sense of just how many features Apple has developed for people with various disabilities.
Let’s start vision accommodations. Apple includes the VoiceOver feature that I mentioned
before that gives users auditory descriptions of each onscreen element. But what’s really
neat about this feature is that it’s the first screen reader to support braille displays,
so someone who’s blind can read the screen silently rather than listening to audio. But
Apple took braille display support a step further by allowing VoiceOver to support more
than one braille display at a time. So in a meeting or class, someone can present what’s
on their screen to multiple braille users simultaneously. And for sighted users who
might sit alongside them, there’s an onscreen braille panel that displays both braille and
plain-text versions of the descriptions spoken by VoiceOver. And these features aren’t
limited to Apple’s applications either, third party app developers can easily integrate
Apple’s VoiceOver technology into their apps and give every user a truly equal computing
experience.
Zoom is another feature to help with impaired vision. It’s a built-in magnifier that lets
you enlarge your screen up to 20 times, so you can better see what’s on the display.
You can set up a shortcut for quickly zooming in and out and you can zoom using full screen
or picture-in-picture, allowing you to see the zoomed area in a separate window while
keeping the rest of the screen at its native size. A shortcut key also lets you pan the
screen without moving the pointer while zoomed in. macOS can also flash the screen for notifications
or speak text under your cursor.
And we’ve all probably seen a Mac display with inverted colors before, but maybe you
didn’t understand the purpose of that feature. Well inverting screen colors is another Accessibility
feature that makes the iPhone and iPad easier on the eyes for some people with a sensitivity
to brightness, easier to distinguish for some people with color blindness, and easier to
make out for some people with low vision. And of course this feature is available systemwide
so people who use it have a seamless computing experience.
Now as I mentioned at the beginning of the video, accessibility features aren’t only
for people with disabilities. Any feature that adds convenience to everyone’s life
will be used by everyone. And a couple of those features are Siri and Dictation. So
we all know Siri helps you get things done quicker by using voice commands. But we probably
didn’t think about all the ways it helps people with disabilities. Someone can ask
Siri to send messages, track down files, create reminders, search the web, and even turn on
and off VoiceOver and Invert Colors, without interrupting what they’re doing on the keyboard.
And because Siri is integrated with VoiceOver, they can ask it to find a file and hear the
answer read out loud. And if someone prefers to communicate by typing, there’s also a
“Type to Siri” mode.
And with dictation, you can can talk where you would type. So you can reply to an email,
search the web, or write a report using just your voice. And macOS comes with more than
50 editing and formatting commands. So you can turn on Dictation and tell your Mac to
bold a paragraph, delete a sentence, or replace a word. You can also use Automator workflows
to create your own custom Dictation commands.
But one of the coolest accessibility features for users with impaired vision is something
called Audio Descriptions, where videos, movies, and TV shows read out detailed audio descriptions
of every scene. Like in this video Apple released [clip] Now these audio descriptions aren’t
available for most videos on the internet, but Apple does offer movies with audio descriptions
in the iTunes Store. Hopefully this feature becomes more widespread over time and becomes
as ubiquitous as subtitles.
Now let’s talk about accessibility features for users with hearing impairments. One of
the most popular being FaceTime since it’s a great way to use sign language and another
being closed captions on movies, TV shows, videos, and podcasts. But what if you’re
hard of hearing or deaf in just one ear? Well Apple products include mono audio which plays
the distinct left- and right-channel audio tracks into both ears so you won’t miss
a single note of a concerto or word of an audiobook.
And the last set of accessibility features we’ll cover are for people with limited
physical and motor skills. Apple has actually allowed full use of macOS without ever needing
to click a mouse button thanks to the accessibility keyboard. It gives users with mobility impairments
more advanced typing and navigation capabilities and also supports head-tracking hardware to
move the cursor and select or drag onscreen items. And you’ve probably seen people using
different accessibility accessories like bluetooth switches to navigate onscreen keyboards, and
that technology is enabled by the Switch Control software on Apple devices. This allows users
to create their own custom panels and keyboards, systemwide or app by app, and provides them
with the most efficient access to their Mac.
Now I’ve been talking about how people with disabilities use Apple’s accessibility features,
but I want to discuss features that I think would be helpful for any Apple user. Starting
with three finger dragging on Apple’s trackpad. This is something I use all the time and I
was actually surprised to find the feature under accessibility since I think it should
be a default setting. Instead of pressing down on the trackpad with one finger and moving
a window around with another, you can simply drag three fingers across the trackpad to
move a window. It’s way easier and you can activate this setting by going into accessibility,
mouse & trackpad, trackpad options, and then clicking enable dragging with three finger
drag.
Another feature I use is on my iPhone called Reachability, which can also be found under
the accessibility settings. It moves the screen content down when I double tap the home button
so I can access content in the top left corner with one hand. Something else I see a lot
of people using is LED Flash for Alerts. Activating this will cause the iPhone’s LED light to
flash every time you receive a notification. Something I personally find a bit annoying
but I’ve seen several people use it.
Now as I’ve learned more about accessibility and how important these features are to people
with disabilities, I reflected on my own YouTube content and wondered how I could make my videos
more accessible. And that’s when I decided to spend extra time adding subtitles to every
video I make. I also retroactively added subtitles to almost every video since the beginning
of 2018. And if you’re a content creator, I encourage you also reflect on your own work
and try to make it as accessible as possible for all your fans.
So that’s the history of Apple accessibility, and if you want to vote for the next video
topic, don’t forget to subscribe. Thanks for watching, and I’ll see you next time.