Apple Continues to Enhance Accessibility Options with iOS 11 and High Sierra

Submitted by kgoughnour3 on July 10, 2017 - 11:29am
Promotional Apple image highlighting the accessibility features on iOS11 and High Sierra
During this year’s annual World Wide Developer’s Conference (WWDC), Apple announced a number of accessibility refinements in its upcoming operating systems, High Sierra for Mac and iOS 11 for iPhone and iPad. Both will be available for free this fall. These tweaks include enhancements to Dynamic Type, the option to invert colors to refine contrast for users with visual impairments, accessibility shortcuts on the keyboard, and improvements to Siri’s voice input and synthesis capabilities. In addition, using touch controls, VoiceOver image descriptions will be available to provide more information of what is in the image. 
 
Apple is also radically redesigning its App Store to be more accessible. Ryan McLeod, who’s game Blackbox won this year’s Apple Design Award winner for Innovation in Accessibility, said, “Apple’s always had a huge focus on accessibility that’s become apparent to developers. It’s something I had in mind from the moment I started working on the app. It’s something like localization and internationalization—something that I didn’t want to bite me later if I started implementing it but couldn’t do.”
 
iOS 11 and High Sierra are fairly light in new features compared to previous versions of the operating systems; instead Apple has chosen to focus on refinements and enhancements to the user experience. Source: Steven Aquino, TechCrunch

Additional Information

At this month’s WWDC, Apple unveiled refined accessibility tools

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