iOS Accessibility Review: Hands-Free Commands for Everyone with Apple’s Voice Control

Voice Control is a built-in feature on Apple devices designed to provide comprehensive voice command capabilities, enabling users to control their devices through spoken commands (Apple, n.d.-a). This review evaluates the functionality, usability, and effectiveness of Voice Control on iPhone, offering a perspective on its perceived benefits and disadvantages.

Device Description

Voice Control is an accessibility feature primarily designed to help individuals with physical disabilities who may have difficulty using traditional input methods such as touchscreens, keyboards, or pointer devices. It leverages Apple's speech recognition technology to execute actions based on a specified set of voice commands, allowing users to navigate their devices, dictate text, and interact with applications hands-free. Voice Control must be downloaded before it can be used, but it does not require an internet connection afterwards (Apple, n.d.-a; Apple, n.d.-c; Apple support, 2021).

?Available on macOS, iOS, and iPadOS, Voice Control offers extensive customisation options. Users can create custom commands, add vocabulary, and adjust settings such as language variants to enhance accuracy and responsiveness. The feature also supports real-time feedback and interaction overlay options, which help users interact more efficiently with the screen interface (Apple, n.d.-d).

Voice Control is compatible with iOS 13 or later and iPadOS on Apple mobile devices (Apple, n.d.-d). It requires macOS Catalina 10.15 or later to run on a Mac (Terech, 2024). Additionally, Apple has announced upcoming support for a broader range of speech, called Atypical Speech, expected to be released later in 2024 (Apple, 2024).

The primary target users for Voice Control are individuals with motor impairments, but this feature will benefit anyone who prefers or (temporarily) requires hands-free device interaction. This feature can benefit many age groups, from children to older adults.

Usability and User Experience

Setting up and activating Voice Control is straightforward across all supported devices, following Apple's standard process to set up an accessibility feature. Users go to Settings (or System Settings on Mac), select Accessibility, and choose Voice Control under the Speech heading (Apple, n.d-c; Apple, n.d.-d). While discoverability remains a persistent issue, the process becomes familiar and user-friendly after setting up one or two accessibility features on an Apple device.?

Voice Control may be activated by Siri, voice command, or Attention Awareness, which causes Voice Control to deactivate when the user looks away and reactivate when the user looks at the iPhone (Apple, n.d.-d). Although mitigated by an interactive user guide linked directly under the Voice Control activation toggle, a noticeable learning curve in using Voice Control effectively was observed. Command words must be learned and consistently used to distinguish between actions and dictations. Currently, 'natural language' processing is not supported. The necessity of memorising command words is alleviated by the ability to call up the commands at any point by saying, 'What can I say?' or by toggling the Hints feature (Apple Support, 2021). The Hints functionality displays suggestions at the top of the screen when what was said is similar to, but does not quite match, the expected command words (Apple, n.d.-b). If the names of interactive screen elements are unknown, overlays (names or numbers) may be activated. These overlays can be further refined into a visual grid with numbered quadrants for more precise selection. This feature may be beneficial when an application has not been developed accessibly. Additionally, some users may experience difficulties with speech recognition accuracy, particularly in noisy environments or for those with non-standard accents.

Benefits and Disadvantages

The key benefit of Voice Control is that it provides an alternative means of interaction, reducing barriers between users and their devices. This feature allows individuals with motor impairments to control their devices and also benefits individuals in scenarios where hands-free interaction is preferred, such as during cooking.

However, several disadvantages and limitations were noted. The accuracy of the speech recognition engine can be affected by background noise as well as speaker accents, potentially causing frustration. The initial learning curve could also be challenging; certain command words must be memorised to achieve the desired actions. Furthermore, while Voice Control offers customisation, it currently does not support all languages or dialects, limiting its accessibility for non-native or non-English speakers (Apple, n.d.-b). Finally, Voice Control is not supported across all applications, as evidenced by Apple's announcement to support Car Play later in 2024 (Apple, 2024).

Additional Comments

Several improvements could enhance the usability and functionality of Voice Control. Allowing users to customise the sensitivity of speech recognition or only activating on allowed (specified) voices could help address issues with unintended activations. Supporting natural language or alternative commands without manual setup could reduce user abandonment due to the unexpectedly high learning curve. Expanding language support and improving speech recognition accuracy for various accents would further enhance Voice Control's inclusivity. Finally, integrating AI capabilities to understand context and user intent and automatically learn user-preferred phrases or idiomatic expressions could enhance the overall user experience, making Voice Control a more robust and intuitive accessibility tool.

?References

Apple. (n.d.-a). Accessibility. https://www.apple.com/uk/accessibility/#footnote-10 ?

Apple (n.d.-b). How to customise Voice Control commands on your iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. https://support.apple.com/en-gb/118275?cid=ytsc_ytyt135

Apple. (n.d.-c). Use Voice Control commands to interact with your Mac. https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/mac-help/mh40719/mac

Apple. (n.d.-d). Use Voice Control on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. https://support.apple.com/en-gb/111778

Apple. (2024, May 15). Apple announces new accessibility features, including Eye Tracking, Music Haptics, and Vocal Shortcuts. https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2024/05/apple-announces-new-accessibility-features-including-eye-tracking/

Apple Support. (2021, November 4). How to use Voice Control on iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch | Apple Support [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eg22JaZWAgs

Terech, K. (2024, March 9). Voice Control is a great hidden feature in macOS that gives you hands-free control of your Mac. Techradar. https://www.techradar.com/computing/mac-os/voice-control-is-a-great-hidden-feature-in-macos-that-gives-you-hands-free-control-of-your-mac