Comment by devinprater | Hacker News Reader

Comment by devinprater | Hacker News Reader

I wonder what new voices will be added to VoiceOver? We blind people never, ever thought Eloquence, an old TTS engine from 20 years ago now, would ever come to iOS. And yet, here it is in iOS 17. I wouldn't be surprised to see DecTalk, or more Siri voices. More Braille features is amazing, and they even mentioned the Mac! VoiceOver for Mac is notoriously never given as much love as VoiceOver for iOS is, so most blind people still use Windows, even though they have iPhones.

I was expecting to see much better image descriptions, but they've already announced a ton of new stuff for plenty other disabilities. Having haptic music will be awesome even for me, adding another sense to the music. There are just so many new accessibility stuff, and I can't wait to see what all is really new in VoiceOver, since there's always new things not talked about in WWDC or release notes. I'm hoping that, one day, we get a tutorial for VoiceOver, like TalkBack on Android has, since there are so many commands, gestures, and settings that a new user never learns unless they learn to learn about them.

>I'm hoping that, one day, we get a tutorial for VoiceOver

Maybe it's not feasible for you but if you're ever near an Apple Store, you could definitely call them and ask whether they have an accessibility expert you could talk to. In the Barcelona Apple Store for example, there is a blind employee who is an expert at using Apple's accessibility features on all their devices. He loves explaining his tips and tricks to anyone who needs to.

My friends that use synthetic voices prefer cleanliness of the older and familiar voices. One friend listens at about 900 WPM in skim mode and none of the more realistic voices work well at those rates.

Back in the 90s we reverse engineered / patched the classic MacInTalk to speed up playback. Our testers had it cranked so fast as they navigated the UI that to me it sounded more like musical notes than text.

Every once in a while I'll hear a blind person's phone audio while I'm out and about and it sounds like an unintelligible stream of noises, but they're interacting with it and using it and getting information from it. It's amazing, a whole other world of interaction from what I experience with my phone. I kind of want to learn how they're interacting with it.

Here's a great demo by a blind software engineer that explains some of it: https://youtu.be/wKISPePFrIs?si=YOLcW9b2uyLXLn59

The image description stuff is already surprisingly good - I noticed when I got a photo text while driving and it described it well enough for me to know what it was.

Same, a family member send a photo while I was driving and over Carplay it was described fairly accurately.

It’s sometimes awesome, and often extremely basic. “Contact sent you a picture of a group of people at an airport”. Amazing. “Contact sent you a screenshot of a social media post”. Useless. We know iOS can select text in pictures, so Siri can clearly read it. It knows it’s SoMe, so why not give me the headline?

I’m hoping this shows up in iOS 18.

> It knows it’s SoMe, so why not give me the headline?

There's certainly a non-zero number of times this could go horribly wrong (I'm guessing CarPlay doesn't have any sense of who is in the car with you) and defaulting to not reading them out is the safest option (but they could definitely add a toggle for this, yeah.)

The same is true with reading out text messages. I’ve disabled it for CarPlay now after receiving a mildly raunchy text with a car full of colleagues. It’s still useful on the headphones though.

Only if you have apple headphones though. If you've got some other thing, for some reason, it doesn't know how to tell you anything.

"Wife sent you a photo of a nude woman in the shower"

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