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Comment by bilbo0s | Hacker News Reader

Let's be honest, compare the amount of money a corporation can make helping visually impaired people to the amount of money they can make replacing software developers and financial analysts.

Don't get me wrong, Apple using these technologies to help humans who are in need of help is laudable. But let's not pretend we don't know why most corporations don't look into this kind of thing. I think if we're being honest, we all very much know why they leave this sort of thing to the always nebulous "others".

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Tim Cook has been pretty clear where he stands:

> “When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind,” he said, “I don’t consider the bloody ROI.” It was the same thing for environmental issues, worker safety, and other areas that don’t have an immediate profit. The company does “a lot of things for reasons besides profit motive. We want to leave the world better than we found it.”

— https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2014/03/07/why-tim...

Again, it's absolutely great that Apple does these things!

I was just answering the question of why other corporations don't.

Money.

There's relatively little money in helping the visually impaired. You have to do it because you want to do it. Not because you're going to get rich.

Apple's competitors have had these features for years (Android for 7, Windows for 1), so it's really an indictment of Apple. They give lip service to helping the visually impaired, and this press release is good marketing for the non-visually impaired people who don't know this.

Really? I haven't used Android recently, but I very much doubt 7 year old Talkback was any where near as good as Voiceover. I also haven't seen a single accessibility improvement in Windows recently. The most accessible Windows apps are usually based on older toolkits like win32. Edge is very accessible, but 99% of that comes from Chrome.

https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/platforms/android... worked very well in English when it launched. I'm sure it supports more languages now.

It turns out Windows introduced this feature in 2022, not last year. https://www.elevenforum.com/t/turn-on-or-off-live-captions-i...

I see, you're interested in the screen reader improvement. Android added that in 2024. https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2024/09/talkback-u...

Windows added it in 2025. https://www.accessibility.org.au/narrator-update-brings-ai-d...

>But let's not pretend we don't know why most corporations don't look into this kind of thing.

I assume almost everyone looks into spending less money than more money for equivalent goods and services.

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