Welcome to the twenty-ninth episode of Access On, the National Federation of the Blind's Technology podcast.
Episode
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Timestamps
On this episode, Jonathan Mosen, Judy Dixon, Michael Feir and Heidi Taylor take a look at what's coming in the 2026 versions of Apple's operating systems, iOS, watchOS, tvOS, MacOS, visionOS, and iPadOS.
Transcript
Live the life you want.
Jonathan:
Welcome to the special edition of Access On, the technology podcast of the National Federation of the Blind. This week, in-depth coverage of Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference keynote from a blindness perspective. She's almost my neighbor now, in Virginia, it's Judy Dixon, tech author and enthusiast. In Canada, it's Michael Feir, who's just released his iOS Personal Power Third Edition.
Giving us additional audio description of what went on from New Zealand, we are joined by Heidi Taylor. Let's do a quick go round, shall we? Just find out what everybody's overall impressions are. We don't need to get into the weeds yet, but I just want to get a feel for how jazz you're feeling, one to 10, 10 being super jazz about that WWDC keynote. Judy Dixon, welcome near neighbor. How did you feel about it?
Judy Dixon:
I think I might give it a 1.5, although I'm thinking of buying an iPad.
Jonathan:
Okay, well, that's pretty harsh. Pretty harsh. What about you, Mike?
Michael Feir:
Well, it gives me some hope because it looks like they're really concentrating on smaller things, so I would probably give it about a six.
Judy Dixon:
Oh, you're a nice person.
Jonathan:
Yes, yes, yes. He's always an optimist, that's Mike. Heidi in sunny New Zealand, what do you think?
Heidi Taylor:
Well, it is not sunny, but I was thinking about a four.
Jonathan:
Okay, all right. I would give it about a three. I want to just talk about, before we get into, as I say the weeds, did anybody else watch the Google keynote a couple of weeks ago, two or three weeks ago?
Michael Feir:
No.
Judy Dixon:
I did not.
Jonathan:
Okay.
Heidi Taylor:
No.
Jonathan:
Because it was really interesting to contrast it, the Google keynote seemed so innovative. It was full of really exciting AI things. They were talking about the new Glasses platform. They are going viral with their video thing where you can create these cute little video clips that are apparently very realistic, and it just had a lot of zing, and bazas, and spark and it just felt a little forced today with the Apple One.
But let's go through, and what I thought we would first do is just go back a little bit to May the 15th Global Accessibility Awareness Day, because one of the nice things about the Apple timetable now is that we get a little sneak peek of the next version of the operating system before anybody else.
There were some accessibility features. I wondered if we could just go around, particularly Judy and Mike, and just find out whether any of those have stuck in your memory from then. Judy?
Judy Dixon:
Yes, the Braille note taker I find very interesting. We don't really know what form it's going to take exactly. Will it be an individual app? Will it somehow be incorporated into Braille screen input? There's a lot we still don't know about it, but anything called Braille note taker, I'm interested.
Jonathan:
Yeah, I think they called it Braille access mode or something, didn't they? Something like that.
Judy Dixon:
Yes, but they say it can access BRF files, and I heard an interview with Sarah Herrlinger where she did specifically use the words Braille note taker.
Jonathan:
Right, it's really clear that they're trying to Sherlock, which is the term that we use for when Apple comes along and tries to disrupt an industry. They're trying to Sherlock the blindness note taker industry. That is very interesting. As I think I mentioned on Access
On here at the NFB, we really want to keep a close eye on that because it will be attractive to educators, to people procuring, because iPads and iPhones are familiar devices. They're not these unfamiliar potentially weird proprietary note taker devices, but we've got to make sure that they're fit for purpose. Mike, what about you?
Michael Feir:
I think the thing that really stuck with me was the nutrition labels for App Store, for apps in terms of accessibility. That has some big implications, especially for beginners. If you can know for more certain that an app you're thinking of trying is said to work with VoiceOver, that's huge.
Especially if they can make it so you can search and specify that you only want apps that are indicated working with accessibility features like VoiceOver, that would be ideal because that's a missing thing.
Judy Dixon:
I think if you did that though, you might end up missing out on a whole lot of apps that were absolutely fine, but the developer didn't even know that.
Michael Feir:
Absolutely. I would absolutely agree with that. It's just that for beginners I think you'll lose a lot if they run into apps that they get and then they find they don't work. That can be really discouraging for a lot of people I've talked to. This would eliminate that until they were ready to gamble to try some of these things.
Jonathan:
I'll be interested to see the degree to which Apple police these nutrition labels, because it's also possible that developers may say things that are a little bit of a stretch
Michael Feir:
Yeah.
Judy Dixon:
If they'll let users say, "Oh, no, this is not the case." Then, they'll go back and revise those labels.
Jonathan:
Right, so this is similar, to those who aren't familiar with those nutrition labels, this is similar to the privacy ones that have been there for a while now, where they disclose how they treat your data. Now, there are going to be accessibility nutrition labels optionally that third-party app developers can add, so it's potentially beneficial.
The one thing I wish would accompany this though is the ability to more easily return an app if you find that it's just not accessible. That's so easy to do on Android, but there are hoops that you have to go through with iOS, whereas you can just delete the app and ask for a refund within a certain number of hours on Android and it all just happens.
All right, let's move on to some specific things from this keynote, starting off with some references at the beginning to Apple Intelligence. I think this is as close to an apology as we are going to get from Apple because last year Apple Intelligence was what it was all about, and they showed some very impressive demos in terms of things that Siri was going to be able to do by iOS 18.4.
It really looked quite amazing from an accessibility perspective because you could query the screen, you could do all sorts of very significant things with Siri, and it really felt like it was finally coming of age that new things were happening with Siri. They ran into some trouble. They had to say, "Actually, sorry, it's not ready for prime time."
They made that point again, it's not ready for prime time yet, but they hope to have things mature over the coming year. A year on from Apple Intelligence, how are people finding it in reality?
Michael Feir:
Honestly, you could get the same. I feel like if people just got the right apps and paid subscriptions to Chat GPT and Google Gemini, you could probably accomplish pretty much everything that you could with Apple Intelligence. Now, the one caveat there is privacy, which is a biggie for a number of people. I do like that thought of intelligence that is made just to serve you and not gobble your data for someone else's purposes, so there's that.
But when I did my book, I went back to the Ulysses expert system for editing it because it was just, I could rely on what it did. I could make more of those decisions myself instead of having it do everything and then going, oh, do I like this all or not kind of thing.
Yeah, it's helpful, but whether it was really worth jumping on a new iPhone for, for a lot of people I would say not. Apple's going to have to make good on that. I think they will. It is just taking more time, but yeah, as it stands now, they've got more work to do.
Judy Dixon:
I agree with you.
Jonathan:
Judy, you wrote a book on AI, so you must've have done a deep dive into all of this.
Judy Dixon:
I did, and the tools that are in writing tools, which are really minimal, the email tools, the summarize email, most people are finding that pretty annoying and all they're asking is, how can I get it back the way it was? There's not much there, there is really not. I get what Mike is saying about privacy and I think that is a major thing, but they've got a long way to go to catch up.
Jonathan:
Yeah, so the things that Chat GPT and Gemini are doing now are amazing. For example, my Gemini got updated a little while ago and now I can run the screen sharing. I can go to a website in Safari and I can actually talk to Gemini about what's on the screen, what's on that website, and just drill down and ask further questions about a product and things like that.
It's quite remarkable what these other things are doing. Does it offend the grammarian in you, Judy? There's a lot of passive voice in Apple Intelligence summaries in email. An extraordinary amount of passive voice.
Judy Dixon:
I've noticed that too. I worked for the government too long to be offended by passive voice.
Jonathan:
All right then, so that was the intro. Then, we got into the new operating systems and the first thing that we should say about these is that they've gone JAWS-like where-
Judy Dixon:
I love it. Isn't that great?
Jonathan:
Well, it does make it easier. Now, the operating systems are going to have the year where they're mainly going to be used. All of the operating systems with this batch are going to be whatever 26. We're starting with iOS 26 and with all of these operating systems, Apple spent a lot of time talking about a visual makeover, the likes of which we haven't had since iOS 7.
Now, what I found with iOS 7 was a lot of it was more aesthetic than anything. I didn't really notice significant VoiceOver UI changes between 6 and 7 really, but I got the feeling this is much more consequential. Heidi, can we come to you and just get a feel for what these changes actually look like, if you're able to explain them in a way that a blind person will resonate with?
Heidi Taylor:
Okay, first of all, I want to say that I don't like that they've used 26, I would rather they use 25, but that's just the Heidi-ism.
Jonathan:
Cars do this too. You get the car models towards the end of the year, not the '26 model. But yeah, okay.
Heidi Taylor:
Yeah, I just wanted to note that.
Jonathan:
Right, get it off your chest. Yeah.
Heidi Taylor:
Yes. They've gone for this transparency effect, I guess, to try and highlight backgrounds and stop distracting from your content I think is what they're going for. I think it's just going to lead to lots of contrast issues, honestly, which could quite affect people with low vision.
I assume there'll be a setting where you can make it more solid again, but in some of these shots it's really hard to see the controls now if the background is really busy, so I didn't like that, but it does look very modern and shiny and things like that. They've removed a lot of the edge to edge sections around the bottom and top of the screen, so where you'd have your menu bar and all tabs and stuff.
It used to span the width, and now, it's more of a floating effect, so there's still content behind it. It may make for smaller target areas as well. If you're trying to locate something by touch, it may be a little bit more difficult, but mostly it's just a pretty thing.
Jonathan:
Okay, so did you see anything that would suggest that VoiceOver would have to be radically updated to accommodate the UI or is it going to mainly be an aesthetics thing, do you think?
Heidi Taylor:
It really just looks like aesthetics. It's the same operating system just with a new coat of paint. It feels very much like what they did with iOS 7. It feels the same underneath. They just, yeah, made it...
Jonathan:
Does it look and feel more consistent across Apple's operating systems now? Like, they're going for this look in all the operating systems?
Heidi Taylor:
Yeah, so they've really pushed it across the whole line. Everything's using the glassy transparent floaty effect, but it looks like the operating systems underneath, they're still essentially what they were, just slightly refreshed. I feel like from a VoiceOver perspective, you're not going to notice much.
Jonathan:
Any questions, Judy, or Mike from Heidi?
Michael Feir:
Well, I'm hoping that's the case, that it won't really affect VoiceOver users as much, because that does sound like if things... I imagine there are still places that we can rely on things being, hopefully, like they were talking about controls at the bottom right tabs and bars at the top.
You've still got that concept of the content being centered between elements. That sounds like it should all still work well. I really hope we don't have to deal with smaller targeting areas. Some of these controls are pretty small already, yeah, that could make it a bit more difficult.
Judy Dixon:
But it's always been a problem when watchOS whatever number, I think it's 11 now, but it's even hard to remember what number watchOS is on because it's always been out of sync with all the others. I just like the fact, I had the same thought about, well JAWS was ahead of its time because it used to have a separate numbering system and then it went to years. Maybe it's just a thing to do.
Jonathan:
It's a trendsetter. Now, there are some new things, there are some new things to talk about in iOS, but it is a little sparse this year. There's a new unified layout in the phone app if you want it. My understanding is you can toggle it off as well to get it back to the way it used to be. But if you want, there are favorites, recents, and voicemail all on the one screen.
It's supposed to make you get the information you need at a glance, and you now can have voicemail summaries with Apple Intelligence. There's some call screening features as well and that means that automatically if you call and you don't disclose your number in the United States, you do the *67 thing or you are calling from a business where numbers are blocked by default, then it won't ring.
It will silence those calls and then the caller has to state who they are and why they're calling, and then you'll get notified and you can choose to take the call or not. I don't know whether that's all a toggleable feature or not, but that's certainly now an option. The one that I think many people will be pleased with, and I believe Android's had this for yonks now, is that there's hold assist, which means that it will keep your spot.
You can keep using your iPhone or just put the phone down, and when finally you are off hold and the music stops and you actually get a human to talk to, the phone will ring again and you'll answer the call. Meanwhile, it will tell the agent, hang on, while I raise this person that you put on hold for so long.
Judy Dixon:
Humans actually answer telephones?
Jonathan:
Yeah, apparently
Judy Dixon:
I've heard of this.
Jonathan:
Yeah, and there's milk and honey as well somewhere.
Judy Dixon:
Yes.
Michael Feir:
Well, what about those prompts when you're on hold and it comes on, you're an important call to us and you're these many places? Will that perhaps trigger? I imagine they would've made it so that didn't trigger the... Yeah.
Judy Dixon:
Yeah, they've probably thought of that.
Michael Feir:
Yeah.
Jonathan:
From an accessibility point of view, I'm really pleased with this feature and I'll tell you why. There's been a bug that's been around for a wee while now where you can get the iPhone into a state, if you're wearing made for iPhone hearing aids, where VoiceOver is very quiet.
You used to be able to fix this by changing the audio destination, but for the longest time, maybe three or four versions of iOS, even if you have audio destination selected in the rotor, it never comes up. This has been a long-standing bug. For those with made for iPhone hearing aids and things get very quiet, it's hard to go about your business and do other things on your phone while you're on hold.
Now, you'll be able to do that because you just forget about the hold music and your phone will alert you when it's time to come back to the call, so that will be good
Heidi Taylor:
With the call screening, they showed it with just unknown numbers, like people who aren't in your contact list.
Jonathan:
Right.
Heidi Taylor:
That may be something to be aware of. It's not just hidden numbers.
Jonathan:
Okay, yeah. Well, I hope that's configurable because if a number is disclosed and it's not in my contacts, I don't want to put it through the call screening. I would imagine that's a toggle. Let's talk messages, shall we? Now, there are polls.
Mate, I would like this because I was in a meeting with a large number of people just two or three weeks ago. We were trying to decide, was it Jimmy Johns or Papa Johns, or whatever? If we could just do a quick poll and have people vote on what people want, that would be great. This is a nice feature and it's available in other messaging apps as well.
Judy Dixon:
It's great. Yes, I kept thinking of WhatsApp when they were describing all these features because WhatsApp has a lot of them.
Jonathan:
Yet, WhatsApp adoption is quite slow in the United States, isn't it? It's massive everywhere else, but it seems to be-
Judy Dixon:
Oh, yeah, I use it a lot because I communicate so much with people outside the United States and that's what they use. I use it a great deal and it's a wonderful app. It's very accessible and really nice.
Jonathan:
Apple Intelligence will suggest that you create a poll when there's a little bit of aji-baji going on in a group chat, and it looks like a poll might help. It's like your Jiminy Cricket monitoring.
Judy Dixon:
That'll be fun. It'll be fun.
Jonathan:
Yes. Yeah, I think it will be good. You can request and send Apple Cash from group chat now, so that's very handy if you are trying to settle up after a night at Ruth's Chris or whatever. It's the happiest place on earth by the way. It's the magical kingdom, magical kingdom of food, Ruth's Chris. Yeah, typing indicators now show you who in group chat is typing, so that's much appreciated.
There's also on-device spam detection, so unknown senders appear in a dedicated area and until you accept, messages from unknown senders remain silent. It's an interesting decision there. You apparently won't get your text tone if somebody who texts you is not in your contacts. Any thoughts before we go on from messages? Looks the same, Heidi?
Heidi Taylor:
They added a background feature, but other than it's the same.
Jonathan:
Okay. Live track-
Heidi Taylor:
Not like the background thing really affects anyone.
Jonathan:
Right. Live translation then. This is pretty nice and I think Microsoft Teams and some other apps have had this for a while, but it is built in across all of Apple's communications apps. If you receive a text message that's pretty straightforward, it will be translated into your preferred language. What's even more impressive is that there's real time audio translation going on.
If you get a phone call or a FaceTime call, then you will be able to hear using a realistic sounding electronic voice in your language what the person is saying. That's going to be available to an API as well, an application programming interface. That means that third-party apps will be able to take advantage of all this on-device Apple translation.
Michael Feir:
I like that.
Judy Dixon:
Did they say which languages they were going to have that for?
Jonathan:
Did we get that on the screen, Heidi?
Heidi Taylor:
I don't think so. No. They showed it off with Spanish, French, and German and English obviously, but I don't think there's a list.
Jonathan:
Okay. Oh, no doubt we'll be able to see that on the Apple website in due course. But that's a pretty exciting feature and will make it great for those international conference calls, Judy.
Judy Dixon:
That would be great, I know. I'm very pleased about this.
Jonathan:
Yes. Apple Music. That has added lyrics, translation. Sometimes I think I want the English lyrics translated, or some of the stuff, but that's just me being a curmudgeon, I think. They got pronunciation in there as well. The thing that does excite me is this auto-mixing function.
It seamlessly mixes from one song to another song, and apparently it does beat matching and that kind of thing because it is, if you're on a plane listening to your big Apple Music playlist, it's annoying to have the gaps.
A long time ago I had an app that did intelligent cross-fading on the iPhone. I cannot remember what that app was called, but it died to death. But this sounds like it's going to be the closest thing. You can pin your favorite artists or playlists to the top of your library. Yeah, there the Beatles will be for me.
Michael Feir:
Of course.
Jonathan:
Yeah, so some nice little enhancements to Apple Music. Changes to Apple Maps. You can check the widgets for Apple Maps and just see how long your commute is going to take in the morning. That's useful.
You'll get notified if there's a delay that you should be aware of, so that you can try and get on time. Just going through, you can create, in the Wallet app, you can create a digital ID with a US passport and use it for domestic travel. Does this please you, Judy?
Judy Dixon:
Well, how many states is it going to be valid in?
Michael Feir:
Didn't they say seven or something or nine?
Judy Dixon:
Seven?
Michael Feir:
Yeah.
Judy Dixon:
Yeah, they said it wasn't very many.
Heidi Taylor:
Well, that was with the driver's license. They were talking about the, I think it was nine states.
Judy Dixon:
Right, nine states.
Heidi Taylor:
But they didn't mention a state number for the passport.
Jonathan:
Okay. Well, that would be interesting because we've just gone through here in the United States this real ID thing. Presumably, it's all real ID compliant and they've done work on that, so that could be handy if you've got one less document to carry and you can put it all on your phone. It's a pretty nice idea.
Judy Dixon:
It could be.
Jonathan:
Yeah. Find My. I was curious about this, because it was a very quick reference that Find My can now track bags from a boarding pass. It sounds like that's happening in the Wallet app.
Judy Dixon:
I didn't understand this. How is this going to work?
Heidi Taylor:
When you are in the Wallet app viewing your boarding pass, below the boarding pass itself there are now a few extra options. One of them is track luggage, and it opens the tracking for your luggage air tags so you can view that quickly.
Judy Dixon:
If you put air tags in your luggage, you can track it in your Wallet app?
Heidi Taylor:
Yes.
Judy Dixon:
Oh, that's cool.
Jonathan:
It requires an air tag in the bag, does it? It's not hooked into the airline's baggage checking system?
Heidi Taylor:
No, it's using air tags.
Jonathan:
Okay.
Judy Dixon:
Yeah, that's what I didn't understand.
Michael Feir:
It's just a quick way of getting to the info. You could do the same thing in Find My, I guess.
Judy Dixon:
Yes.
Heidi Taylor:
Yes.
Jonathan:
Yes. All right. We are hearing consistent rumors that Apple is about to update the air tag, and that that will include things like finding it from a longer distance away and also, cue the applause, a louder speaker.
Judy Dixon:
Please, louder. Oh, yes. You can't hear it. Especially if you put it in a bag, you're never going to hear it.
Jonathan:
No. Well, even people who don't have hearing impairments like I do say this.
Judy Dixon:
Oh, yeah. I don't have hearing impairment and I can't hear it.
Jonathan:
Okay, there you go. Well, hopefully the new one will be blasting away.
Judy Dixon:
When do you think that will be around?
Jonathan:
I understand it's imminent, I understand it's ready. It's just a matter of when Apple chooses to launch it. One would think they're not going to hang onto it until their hardware event, because that's another couple of months away, it's just three months away potentially. All right. You can redeem rewards when you are shopping in person with Apple Pay now.
I'm interested in the Apple Pay experience that you've had, Judy, and possibly Mike as well, because one of the things that came up from an Access On listener, and I have seen this now, having been living in the United States for six months. I've seen this where it's actually not that seamless for a blind person to pay with Apple Pay, because so often you're prompted with all sorts of additional things that you have to complete.
It could be a tip, it could be rewards programs that you have to acknowledge that you're a part of or not. It's not just like in New Zealand, typically, Apple Pay is just a case of holding it up against the terminal and it goes, bing. It's more complex here.
Michael Feir:
Same here in Canada.
Judy Dixon:
I use Apple Pay a lot, Jonathan, two or three times a week I would say at least, and I'm not having that problem.
Jonathan:
Okay, so it must be quite specific to certain types of-
Judy Dixon:
Well, maybe people who have other kinds of apps or accounts or something. But no, I use it a lot and I find it very accessible and very nice.
Jonathan:
It is great when it works, you just put your watch or whatever up in it. It is just great. Even after all these years it still thrills me to pay that simply.
Judy Dixon:
Well, the credit card payment thing in New Zealand is so much nicer than here though, because you just hold your credit card over, it goes bing, and you leave. Here, it stops, and do you want to add a tip? All this stuff. It's not very accessible and not very seamless, but I haven't had that problem with Apple Pay.
Jonathan:
Emails will provide shipping information, sometimes tracking numbers, that sort of thing. Now, how does it work, Heidi? How do you get that into the wallet? Because apparently you can, Apple's tried to do this before, so I'm not sure what's new here, but apparently you can track your parcels in the Wallet app.
Heidi Taylor:
They just hand waved it. It's like, Apple Intelligence detects that there's a shipment and you've got a tracking number and now it's in the wallet. That really explain it.
Jonathan:
Okay. Right, so trying to Sherlock the Parcel app.
Judy Dixon:
Parcel, yes. I thought of-
Jonathan:
It is a great app, the Parcel app.
Judy Dixon:
It is.
Jonathan:
I've been using it for a very long time and they gave me, I think it was like six months credit because I've been using it so long. It is just one guy, indie developer, and the Parcel app is wonderful. Yeah.
Michael Feir:
Yeah, that's my favorite of them all.
Judy Dixon:
Mine, too.
Jonathan:
Now, it is possible... Well, let's talk about the Games app. There's a new Games app, what do we know about this, Heidi?
Heidi Taylor:
I don't know. It's an app and it has all your games in it. It feels like the App Store without the store part and just for games and some challengey stuff.
Michael Feir:
It's pulling together the elements from the App Store and Apple Arcade and the Game Center and shoving them all into one app.
Heidi Taylor:
Yes.
Judy Dixon:
These are third party games, not Apple Games?
Michael Feir:
They're both. The Apple Arcade games are specifically Apple Commissions, those for the arcade experience and you subscribe and you get access to the whole lot for one subscription price. Then, the third party games are just in the App Store and you'd find them in the games tab in the App Store. Those are games that are not in the Apple Arcade but are developed by third party, and you could go through.
Any audio game, accessible game that I have is a third party game that you would search for in the App Store, usually in the search section and search tab and you just search out. It sounds like they're taking pretty much all of the things you'd need for your gaming life and sticking it in that one app.
Probably with the exception of buying apps in the App Store, if you want to buy games. But once you have them then you could launch them from this app and things like that. It sounds like it's integrating a lot of stuff.
Jonathan:
Maybe we'll all be getting our dice world challenges from this new app. Farkle for the win. Are you using Visual Intelligence much, Judy?
Judy Dixon:
No.
Jonathan:
Yeah, I'm not either. I thought I might, but the camera control's an interesting beast, isn't it?
Judy Dixon:
It's pretty easy to use. It comes up with just a couple of choices and you can... but it doesn't give you very much information. The AI apps are just so much better.
Jonathan:
You're right.
Michael Feir:
Yeah, we're spoiled for choice there because I think Be My AI is usually what I go to for things like that. I was testing it and took a picture of this drink bottle that my friend left after we enjoyed it, of course. It did give me, I wondered whether I had to chill the drink before drinking it, and it did give me, after I asked, when you take the picture, it gives you a rundown of what something is.
It's good for that if you don't have an app. Then, you could ask for the questions and it goes through Chat GPT at the moment. You ask, should I chill this before I drink it? It will come back with an answer, so it's useful from that sense.
Jonathan:
Yeah, we've really asked for choice now because Chat GPT will use the camera, you can talk to it. You could also do that with Envision's Ally app, and of course, Gemini is now doing it on the iPhone as well. There are a lot of things where you can have real-time conversations now about what's being seen through the camera.
We know now that Aira is working on this option with Google to offer a virtual IRA agent. We are spoiled for choice. I forget what phone your driving these days, Heidi.
Heidi Taylor:
An iPhone 16 Pro.
Jonathan:
Girl, that's excellent.
Heidi Taylor:
You bought it for me.
Jonathan:
Did I really?
Heidi Taylor:
Then, mine arrived before yours and we did a whole episode on living Blindfully.
Jonathan:
That's right. I remember that. Yes, yes. How can I forgotten that? Well, there's a lot of things going on.
Heidi Taylor:
I showed off my sweet VoiceOver skills and everyone was very impressed.
Jonathan:
Yeah, I thought you said your sweet voice for a second.
Heidi Taylor:
Oh, that too.
Jonathan:
Okay, well, the iPhone 16, so what do you think of the Visual Intelligence?
Heidi Taylor:
I don't really use it.
Jonathan:
Right then.
Heidi Taylor:
I like the camera button. I use the camera button on the side all the time, but I don't actually use the Visual Intelligence.
Jonathan:
Now, Visual Intelligence comes to your iPhone screen, so it may be something that you want to use a little bit more. The way that you do this is you take a screenshot. What's that? The power button and the volume up, is that right?
Judy Dixon:
Yes.
Michael Feir:
I think so, yeah.
Jonathan:
It will make the little camera noise, but then there'll be additional options. Is that how it works? How do you get the screenshot? But then, at the bottom there were some other options pertaining to Visual Intelligence.
Heidi Taylor:
Yeah, there's a couple of new buttons. There's an ask button where you can type in your question about it or there's just an image search button and that will, I guess, I don't know, Google the image and try and find the thing.
Jonathan:
Right, and this works in any app, so you can do this and ask visual intelligence a question. It also has some Apple Intelligence, so it showed off how it can detect that there's a calendar event here and add it to your calendar.
It's getting easy to do this. Recently, Fantastical, the third-party calendar app that really has done a lot of good things with accessibility and offers a lot of great features, you can now, if you're set up with that, you can forward your calendar or you can forward anything that proposes a time basically to email at Fantastical.app and it will use intelligence to extract it and create a calendar event out of it as well, so this is good. All right.
Judy Dixon:
I wonder if you could use that to find out what unlabeled buttons are and things like that.
Jonathan:
It'd be very interesting to find that out. Yeah. How often do you find that the screen recognition does the job for you in that regard?
Judy Dixon:
Not that often. Not as often as I would like.
Jonathan:
Yeah, it's got me out of quite a few binds, I have to say.
Judy Dixon:
It does.
Jonathan:
It doesn't always.
Judy Dixon:
It can help but it doesn't always work.
Jonathan:
Yeah. All right, any other comments on iOS 26? I've got to get used to that.
Judy Dixon:
Yeah, it's a big leap.
Jonathan:
Yeah. I'm going to go around telling people, I'm running iOS 20 or something just to... Yeah.
Heidi Taylor:
Just to mess with them? They did do a big screen of things they didn't say out loud for iOS-
Jonathan:
Okay, go for it. Go for it.
Heidi Taylor:
Okay. Custom snooze length for alarms.
Judy Dixon:
Oh, interesting.
Heidi Taylor:
It's been nine minutes forever, and now, you can choose. Easier control appearing for gaming, natural language search and messages, events and photos, enhance dialogue in podcasts, lens cleaning hint in camera, select partial text in a message bubble rather than having to copy the whole message, screen sharing and share play on a phone call, not just a FaceTime call. Specify spelling with dictation. More playback-
Jonathan:
Okay, that's cool. That's very cool.
Judy Dixon:
All right, I'm going up to 2.0.
Heidi Taylor:
More playback speeds in podcasts. Accessibility reader as an accessibility option, I assume we've heard about that and the other thing.
Jonathan:
We have, yes. Yeah.
Heidi Taylor:
Braille access, adaptive power for charging and estimated time to charge, add contact button in groups in messages, AirPods pause media when asleep.
Jonathan:
Right. I've heard about this. I was telling Bonnie about this, my wife, the other day because she quite often goes to sleep with a Bard book, Judy. Then, she's woken up a long time after and lost her place. I said, "When iOS 26 comes out, it will detect that you've had an oddy and it will pause the book for you."
Judy Dixon:
I wonder how it knows.
Jonathan:
Yeah. Well, I'm not going to even comment on snoring. It's more than my life's worth.
Judy Dixon:
It's probably blood oxygen or something. No, it's not.
Heidi Taylor:
Also, an Arabic calculator and multi-script keyboard for Arabic and English.
Jonathan:
Right. Okay, so I imagine that the podcast dialogue thing will be similar to what's been in Castro and Overcast and some of those third-party podcast apps for a while now, but that's great. It's turning into an interesting little app, Apple Podcast, because it does all that native transcribing, which is wonderful for DeafBlind people or indeed if you just want to hear an NPR podcast or whatever and speed the whole process up by reading it rather than hearing the audio.
Now, they've got the dialogue boost as well. Final thoughts on iOS 26? Going once? All right, so let's talk about watchOS 26. I don't think this is going to take us too long. Can I just ask though, does anybody else, Mike, you're not rocking an Apple Watch, is that right?
Michael Feir:
No, no, not at the moment.
Jonathan:
Okay.
Michael Feir:
I hope to be soon.
Jonathan:
Judy, I've had this problem since the latest watchOS came out last year, where it just gets into a mode where it says notification center. Notification center over and over.
Judy Dixon:
I have that too.
Jonathan:
Yeah.
Judy Dixon:
Yes, I have that too.
Jonathan:
I feel better now.
Judy Dixon:
There are so many bugs in Apple Watch, it's really sad. I get it into, when I want to reply to a text message, and I just get it. It just clicks. It doesn't speak at all. Just click, click, click, click as I swipe back and forth.
Jonathan:
Yes. Once you start dictating, it does that, I think.
Judy Dixon:
This has been a problem for a long time.
Jonathan:
Yeah, but it's fascinating because Bonnie has it too and so you can just be in the most inopportune place and it will not stop saying notifications center.
Judy Dixon:
Oh, yes.
Jonathan:
Hopefully, that's in watchOS 26, that one's addressed. Now, let's see what we've got. We have got work out buddy. This sounds really cool, actually. If you are rocking the treadmill or doing something else, work out buddy is your own personalized plastic coach. They've got these very peppy, cheery voices that they've borrowed from the fitness instructor in the, instructors, plural, in the Apple Fitness app.
You can choose the chirpy voice that you want and it encourages you. It's giving you spoken feedback and spurring you on and that kind of thing. It sounds very cool, actually. It gives you insights about your workout in real time. It will give you milestones and all sorts of stuff like that. Does this rock anyone else's world?
Judy Dixon:
I would find it annoying.
Jonathan:
You would?
Judy Dixon:
Yes. Like, would you please shut up? I'm trying to do something here.
Jonathan:
What about you, Heidi? Because you're an Apple Watch user, right?
Heidi Taylor:
Yeah, but I don't really work out so I don't feel like I'm fit to comment.
Jonathan:
Okay. Well, I'll use this workout buddy on my own then. What else? It's more aware of your location, so it will suggest things based on where you are. If you get to the gym, it will know that. If you are in a noisy environment, it can automatically adjust its volume, that sort of thing.
Judy Dixon:
That would be nice.
Jonathan:
Yup. Notes come to the Apple Watch. I didn't see a reference to this, but I heard a rumor that you were going to be able to export documents from notes as markdown. Now, if they've actually implemented that, I think that's huge because notes has become a very powerful, notes is almost a misnomer for it now. It's become quite a powerful word processor.
You can of course record phone calls and FaceTime calls and put them in there as well. If you can export as markdown and you have something like Writage on your PC, which allows you to import markdown documents into Microsoft Word, you can do some very serious, lovely text composition on the go on your iPhone and then bring it back to your PC.
Judy Dixon:
I would really use this. I use Writage in Word, and I think that would be really nice. It would make it much more of a Word processor.
Jonathan:
Yes. I just hope they have in fact done that. But notes on the Apple Watch, do we see notes on the Apple Watch working, Heidi?
Heidi Taylor:
Very briefly. It just looks like you'll be able to access your notes and view them. I don't know if you'll actually be able to, how much you'll be able to do with them. It'll be very bare bones.
Jonathan:
Right. Oh, you might be able to dictate into notes on your Apple Watch, because that will be great, for a lot of blind people who just want a quick little voice recorder. There are things that do that, Just Press Record will do that now.
But if you could do that in the notes app, that will be great and it will sync across your iCloud. That's all I really had about watchOS. Does anyone else have anything I missed? Any aesthetics to tell us about, Heidi?
Heidi Taylor:
It's more of the same new glassy, floaty aesthetic. It hasn't really affected the watch much at all, because it already had that aesthetic, the floaty aesthetic, not the glassy one. They did add a new wrist flicking gesture to dismiss notifications.
Michael Feir:
What's that?
Judy Dixon:
Cool.
Jonathan:
How do you do it?
Judy Dixon:
How do you do it?
Jonathan:
Can you describe how you-
Heidi Taylor:
Well, a sighted person, when they want to look at a notification will lift up their arm so they can see the screen. When your arm's in the lifted position, if you flick your hand away from your body so the watch is turning away from you, it dismisses the notification.
Judy Dixon:
Oh, that's interesting.
Jonathan:
Right. Oh, cool. Well, we have to have a play with that.
Judy Dixon:
Yeah.
Jonathan:
Now, tvOS 26 is the operating system that powers the Apple TV. User profiles. Long anticipated this one. Now, it will keep track of things that you like to watch as an individual and you can switch user profiles Netflix style, I guess, or indeed a number of these streaming services where it asks you who's watching. Automatic sign-in for third-party apps.
Now, I'm tentatively excited about this because sometimes getting signed in to things on the Apple TV can be a bit of a mission. You might have to go to a URL and it can be hard to get VoiceOver to speak it or there's a QR code that you might find it difficult to scan. This universal sign-in potentially is a good thing. That's what I had on tvOS, actually. Is there anything else in there?
Heidi Taylor:
I'm excited about the new season of Foundation.
Jonathan:
Okay. Did you read the book, Heidi? The Asimov books?
Heidi Taylor:
I haven't read the books. I've only seen the show. I heard they're very different to each other.
Jonathan:
Yes, that's what put me off when I watched the first season because I'm a curmudgeon and I liked the Asimov books a lot. I read them all and it was like the Star Wars movies. He wrote them in a funky order and he went backwards after the original foundation trilogy and fused it with his robot series as well with prequels and things like that. But no, no mention of For All Mankind though. That's the one I'm waiting for.
Heidi Taylor:
Yeah.
Jonathan:
I cannot wait for that.
Heidi Taylor:
There's a new season of the Morning Show.
Judy Dixon:
Morning Show, yeah, fourth season.
Jonathan:
Yeah. You like the Morning Show?
Heidi Taylor:
Invasion. There's a new one called Chief of War that looks like, it's like either Maori or Polynesian inspired.
Michael Feir:
The audio description said that was Hawaiian-based on that.
Heidi Taylor:
Oh, there you go.
Jonathan:
You already consumed Silo season two, Heidi?
Heidi Taylor:
Oh, absolutely.
Jonathan:
Did you read those books?
Heidi Taylor:
Yes, I've read those.
Jonathan:
Yeah. It was pretty terrible what the author did to the main character at the end. Did you read the short story?
Heidi Taylor:
No, I haven't been able to find the short story.
Jonathan:
Oh, okay. Well, it's probably just as well, but okay, that's good. We should give Apple great credit because I have not seen one thing on Apple TV+ that has not ensured that if the original audio on the primary audio track was Atmos, for example, that it's not also Atmos on audio description, and that is very difficult to find on many other services.
We quite often, as audio description content consumers, get downgraded to mono or stereo. Apple never seems to do that in my experience, so that's great that they take care to do that.
Heidi Taylor:
Yeah.
Jonathan:
macOS. Oh, go ahead.
Heidi Taylor:
Sorry. On the little tvOS screen at the end, there's also something that mentions, permanently connect to any speaker.
Jonathan:
Oh, that's interesting.
Heidi Taylor:
I didn't know that was an issue, but they mentioned it.
Judy Dixon:
Well, I have my Apple TV connected to a pair of HomePods, the big ones.
Jonathan:
Really?
Judy Dixon:
Oh, yeah, it's great. It's like having your own mini fabulous stereo, but it does frequently disconnect and lose it and so if it's improving that, that's a good thing.
Jonathan:
I thought you'd be rocking the new Sonos ARC Ultra with the Sub 4.
Judy Dixon:
I'm so sad about Sonos. Don't even get me going, please.
Jonathan:
Yeah, it is a bit sad.
Judy Dixon:
Christmas was not Christmas last year.
Jonathan:
Yeah, it is a bit sad, but it's good that they're reaching out to the blind community now asking for-
Judy Dixon:
Oh, good.
Jonathan:
Yeah.
Judy Dixon:
Please do everything you can do because it's still bad.
Jonathan:
Never a dull day at the National Federation of the Blind, I can tell you.
Michael Feir:
One thing that caught my attention with this tvOS that might be important for travelers I'm thinking is you can share your accessibility settings.
Judy Dixon:
I had heard about this.
Michael Feir:
You could go presumably into a hotel, I'm thinking input your settings and just have a more customized experience in a new place.
Judy Dixon:
Wouldn't you have to have another Apple TV though?
Michael Feir:
Yeah, I guess if the hotels had that.
Judy Dixon:
I've never seen a hotel that had an Apple TV.
Jonathan:
Apparently, they do. There was a push for Apple TV to get into hotels. I don't know how successful it's been.
Judy Dixon:
It would be nice.
Jonathan:
It would be cool. macOS Tahoe, so it's also macOS 26, but it's also called Tahoe, and there are a couple of new continuity features there. One is the live activities, which I've accidentally mistyped here in my notes as love activities, but definitely live activities. They now appear on the Mac's menu bar.
This is quite cool. If you order DoorDash or UberEats or you have some ride coming and you're working away on your Mac, then you can now check the live activities on the Mac. It'll be on the menu bar. That makes a lot of sense. Then, also the phone app has come to the Mac. All those features that we've talked about earlier with phone, they're now available on Mac as well.
There is quite a lot that Apple said today about the updated shortcuts app. But what I was curious about was the extent to which these might be coming to other operating systems. Was that clear in any of the video material, Heidi?
Heidi Taylor:
They alluded to it in the iPad, I think, but it was mainly in the Mac section.
Jonathan:
Right, so shortcuts is great and for people who like to tinker and maybe just get a feel for the logic of programming, shortcuts are a great way to start, and it is available on iPhone as well if that's what you have. You can write pretty simple shortcuts and there are all sorts of user guides out there for mastering the shortcuts app.
Some from a blindness perspective, some general. It's pretty easy to work out. It can give you some confidence in terms of structure and logic when it comes to programming.
Now, shortcuts can run at a specific time on the Mac now, a time of day, or when something happens on your Mac. It reminded me a bit of technology like IFTTT, which can do some pretty intelligent stuff.
There's intelligence actions that you can now perform. What I like about the Mac is that they've always taken care to provide a very rich command line interface and customization of keyboard shortcuts.
You can go into the menu bar for Mac, and even if the developer hasn't assigned a particular function to a keyboard shortcut, you can do that, which is a huge benefit, a huge win of Mac. Now, you can assign in spotlight searches, I understand, like certain commands, certain shortcut commands like SM for send a message, or whatever you want.
Quickly get to where you need to be right from spotlight search. Apple keeps enhancing spotlight search every single year.
There's something new and exciting in spotlight search, but I know very few people who take advantage of it. I don't know whether we're just missing the point. Any thoughts on macOS, Heidi, that we should know about? Any additional info?
Heidi Taylor:
I don't think so.
Jonathan:
Okay, right, we don't have any Mac users on the call, do we?
Judy Dixon:
I'm not.
Jonathan:
No. Okay. That's macOS. It does look like a relatively solid release. Now, visionOS, anybody played with an Apple Vision Pro?
Judy Dixon:
Nope.
Michael Feir:
Nope.
Heidi Taylor:
Nope.
Jonathan:
Okay, so this is the operating system driving the Apple Vision Pro, the virtual reality device from Apple. It now offers widgets, which of course, because of the Apple Vision Pro landscape are spatial in nature and there are more realistic personas. From what I gathered with this, so personas are used when you're on a video call, for example, to represent you.
But from what I could gather, one of the big benefits of the new persona system is, if you're sitting there with a buddy geeking away, each watching something with your Vision Pro, you can see each other's personas. Is that correct, Heidi?
Heidi Taylor:
I think so.
Jonathan:
Yeah. As well as online, as well as virtual. These are all very visual features and I didn't hear any, other than the widgets which could have some accessibility benefits, I didn't really hear a lot that was new in terms of potential accessibility benefits from visionOS.
Let's go on to the last one, which is the big one, and that is iPadOS. You made a comment at the very beginning, Judy, that you might go and buy an iPad, and I thought exactly the same thing. It really feels like the iPad is coming of age with iPadOS 26. There's a lot to talk about here. The first is improved multitasking.
I am not clear how or if this will benefit VoiceOver users, because it has been possible to position different apps on the screen for a long time with iPad, right, Heidi? What's the principal difference here?
Heidi Taylor:
I think they've over time slowly been moving to a more Mac-like experience, I think. It used to be that you could only have one app on the screen at a time, and then they did the split screen thing where you could have two apps side by side and one that would float around somewhere.
Then, they added the whole Windowy thing where you could, a few and they'd overlap. Now, it's like they have close buttons and minimize buttons, and it just looks like a Mac.
Jonathan:
Right.
Heidi Taylor:
I assume from a VoiceOver perspective it's pretty much you still can only, your focus can only be in one app at a time, so you still have to switch between them. I don't know if it has that much of an impact for a VoiceOver user.
Jonathan:
The big thing is the menu bar. Presumably, they're going to have to find VO+M for the menu bar just like it is on the Mac. What does VO+M do on the iPhone and iPadOS?
Michael Feir:
Oh, I'm thinking the status bar or something.
Jonathan:
Yes, yes, yes. It's an interesting one. Yes. Anyway, they're going to have to re-find things I think because you'd think VO+M will be now menu like it is on the Mac. That's got to be a great experience. It does feel like a touchscreen Mac essentially. There will have to be some VoiceOver changes to accommodate that. They've also changed how you work with files, and this sounds really good.
Judy Dixon:
That's the part that I was excited about.
Jonathan:
Yeah.
Judy Dixon:
That sounds really, and then all the audio stuff, there's really good stuff.
Jonathan:
The way that this works is that you can now drill into files, like using Explorer on Windows or the files app's, it's been around for a long time, but they've beefed it up. You can put a specific folder on the dock if you want.
That's great if you regularly have a downloads folder and you want to get to that downloads folder. You can also specify default apps that the files open in. Again, very Mac-like, very computer-like, and that's looking very exciting.
Judy Dixon:
Why don't they do this for iOS? They could. Yeah.
Michael Feir:
They could. The files app, you're still just dealing with the folders and stuff. I don't find it especially clunky.
Jonathan:
The preview app, which Mac users will be familiar with, for reading and annotating PDFs, that is coming to iPadOS as well. Really, there's a lot of convergence going on here and that's very interesting. Especially with all the work that Apple has done recently on Apple Silicon, a lot of the apps that run on macOS will run on iPadOS and vice versa.
It's quite a compelling proposition. I'm tempted to dabble in this as well. You can now choose default audio input devices. This is fantastic. This is making it a much more viable portable content creation device, and voice isolation will be available no matter what app you are using.
If you want to filter out background noise, that kind of thing, you can go ahead and enable voice isolation.
What's really interesting is a feature that's clearly aimed at the podcaster and what people have done forever in podcasting, is if you've got a couple of geeks or any number of geeks who don't mind doing this, the best way to record a podcast with remote guests is still probably to get everybody to record their own local audio and then upload them to you.
Normally, at the beginning of the call, you'd do something like clap hands or something to get the audio in sync. Then, you just use the local audio. Well, the iPad is now automating that process so you can record your local high quality audio and video.
If you are talking to other people who have iPads, they can do the same and apparently upload your tracks. Did we see the interface for how that works, how all the tracks get uploaded and synced, Heidi?
Heidi Taylor:
No, they didn't show the syncing process. They just showed the little pop-up for the start recording button and that it would save to downloads. They didn't show what happened afterwards.
Jonathan:
Okay. Well, that does sound very nice. Of course, iPads have USB-C these days, so you can plug anything like a microphone or an audio interface in there. Very viable content creation device. I think the challenge will be to find a really nice audio editor that is efficient to work with on iPadOS from a keyboard user's point of view.
Maybe it might be able to encourage the Reaper people to do a version of Reaper for iPadOS because if that could happen and OSARA could work on it, that'd be absolute bliss. That would cause me to buy an iPad in a heartbeat. Journal comes to the iPad as well. That was what I had. Any other comments on iPad, Heidi?
Heidi Taylor:
Nope.
Jonathan:
Nope. Anybody else?
Michael Feir:
That podcasting thing certainly sounds impressive as long as your whole crew has iPads. What about if you have other sources that you want to include? That would be something I would wonder about.
Jonathan:
Right. Judy, you're going to buy one?
Judy Dixon:
I'm sorry, Jonathan, you're very distorted right now.
Jonathan:
Oh, I hope it's only at your end. I was just asking if you are going to buy an iPad.
Judy Dixon:
I don't know. I think I might. I've always thought the iPad minis were very cute and I've been looking for an excuse to buy one, so this might be it.
Jonathan:
Very good. All right. Well, that's what we have with the keynote. It's a little like this here, but still some interesting things. Let's just do a final go around. Heidi, your final thoughts having gone through all that we learned?
Heidi Taylor:
It's still pretty lackluster, honestly.
Jonathan:
Okay. What excites you most? Tell me about the one thing that really jazzes you about this?
Heidi Taylor:
Preview on the iPad probably.
Jonathan:
Okay. Yup. You're rocking an iPad there. How about you, Mike?
Michael Feir:
Well, probably, in iOS, I'm glad that they haven't promised anything major that they won't be able to deliver later. It looks like they're hopefully going to focus on the details and maybe will get rid of some accessibility bugs because of that, that they're not shooting for the moon kind of thing.
That's what I was hoping for. Of course, eventually, I would like to see Siri really take a giant leap. Now, they did talk about APIs, it was mentioned a bit at the end. That I have some hope that developers will be able to use those, especially the APIs that lets them interface with the intelligence.
That could get us some more usefulness out of that hardware before, possibly even before Apple perfects its chat Siri upgrade stuff. If it can tap into developers apps and they can make use of that directly, I'm interested in seeing what happens there.
Jonathan:
Finally, Judy, hopefully you're not sounding like a Dalek on us now, but what do you think of, what's your overall closing thoughts?
Judy Dixon:
I'm really excited about the changes to the Messages app and the phone app and I'd like changes to these everyday things that we all use almost every day.
Jonathan:
Right. You are sounding a bit like a Dalek, but I'm sure you haven't been uploaded to the cloud yet, so that's all right. Well, thank you. We'd like to know what you think of the Operating System 26 releases.
I guess it makes it easy to talk about them from that point of view now. If you have any thoughts, do be in touch, [email protected] is the email address, AccessOn, all joined together, at nfb.org. Thank you all so much for your participation and we'll catch you next time.
Michael Feir:
Absolutely.
Jonathan:
Take care. That concludes this episode of Access On, the technology podcast of the National Federation of the Blind. To send in a contribution for a future episode, email us. Attach an audio clip or just write it down and send it to [email protected]. That's [email protected]. To keep up to date with Access On, follow us on Mastodon, [email protected].
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To learn more about the National Federation of the Blind, visit our website, nfb.org, or phone us, 410-659-9314. That's 410-659-9314, and be sure to check out the Nation's Blind Podcast right from where you heard this podcast.