iOS includes Door Detection in its LiDAR-equipped iPhones.
Ahead of this year’s International Day of People with Disabilities, Apple on Wednesday posted a short film to YouTube, titled The Greatest, that showcases people with disabilities using Apple’s accessibility technologies to live their lives.
This year’s IDPWD is this weekend, on Saturday, December 3rd.
In the film, Apple highlights a slew of features across many developmental domains and devices. They include VoiceOver, Voice Control, image and people detection modes, AssistiveTouch, and Magnifier, amongst numerous others.
For Blind and low vision people, the film has support for audio descriptions.
The film is befitting of this year’s theme for the Day of People with Disabilities, which is described online as “transformative solutions for inclusive development [and] the role of innovation in fueling an accessible and equitable world.” The cavalcade of accessibility software spanning Apple’s five platforms certainly qualify as transformative and innovative to the people who build (and use) them.
Most people, especially those in the tech media and the armchair analysts on Twitter and on podcasts, consider Apple’s myriad innovations to come from hardware such as the Mac, the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad. If you want to be pedantic, software obviously has held big roles in those revolutions; the key distinction is assistive technologies like those from Apple (or its contemporaries) are never given due credit for their innovation. It’s a shame—accessibility software is literally life-changing technology. It opens doors to the world and, pointedly here, to essential everyday devices like laptops, smartphones, and tablets.
Apple’s release of The Greatest is notable for more reasons than one. Consider recent events in the tech sphere that affect the disability community. Over the weekend, Post co-founder Noam Bardin, whose still-in-beta Twitter alternative is moving fast, incensed disabled people and their advocates by announcing in a post that accessibility isn’t something “we are working on” for the foreseeable future because it’s viewed internally as a lower priority than, as Bardin paradoxically wrote, “getting everyone in.” His astounding show of cognitive dissonance comes on the heels of Elon Musk firing the entirety of Twitter’s accessibility team early this month, leaving many Twitter users with disabilities (myself included!) feeling incredibly uneasy over the service’s accessibility to them in the long term.
Apple marches to the beat of its own titanic drummer, so it’s foolish to assume today’s announcement is somehow correlated to the aforementioned recent developments. Nonetheless, the fact the company put together this film, replete with its stratospheric production value, and released it now has fortuitous timing. It feels downright refreshing. As a lifelong disabled person, I, for one, can attest the contrasting tone of The Greatest could not be more welcomely stark.
There are two truths. Yes, the film is a marketing tool—but the cynicism inherent to that singular stance is almost unbearable. With people like Bardin and Musk asserting the disabled community may as well not exist on their respective platforms, the polar opposite message from Apple should not be downplayed as a mere marketing ploy. Of course Apple wants you to use their products, but so too does Amazon and Google and Microsoft and others. There exists a deeper message: the point is not whether Apple is subliminally advertising to people; the salient point is Apple is overtly advertising a disabled person’s basic humanity.
Put another way, Apple is making a concerted effort to make tech equitable and inclusive in ways Bardin and Musk are not. Apple understands disabled people use technology too—to work, play, and shape internet culture like everyone else.
In this context, a work like The Greatest should be celebrated—not diminished.
