WCAG and iOS 13 - The game changing power of a greater accessibility push

From Advanced Voice Control to Mouse Support for iPhone and iPad, Apple is finally catching up to the WCAG community in the company’s greatest push for accessibility to date. During its Worldwide Developers Conference at the beginning of June, Apple brought 3 new features front and center, all of which earned their own demo slides in Craig Federighi’s onstage presentation. All of these features will be released with iOS 13, and will greatly impact the WCAG community by giving disabled users more control over their devices.

Greater voice control over devices with voice commands

Voice control is not a new feature for Apple (it was one of the company’s first initiatives to support users with disabilities) but the new iteration for iOS 13 provides users with a more effortless way to interact with their Apple devices. Voice control has always supported menu navigation and editing, but the new advanced version brings greater dictation capabilities, which can better interpret users with speech impairments such as stuttering.

The most important feature of the new and improved voice control is that it helps a wide range of iOS users and it’s not solely targeted to one type of disability. Itt is fully integrated with attention awareness, a functionality that allows the operating system to know when a user with physical motor limitations is interacting with the device. Voice commands also allow users to operate the device is the same basic ways as an able-bodied user could: including screen pinching, tapping, zooming, and swiping.

Mouse support for users with physical motor delays

Mouse Support is a new setting feature that for the first time allows users to connect a USB mouse to an iPhone. This is available as an AssistiveTouch option and designed for users with physical motor delays who are unable to easily interact directly with the touch screen.

Though there isn’t an official compatibility list available just yet, Apple says this feature works with both USB and Bluetooth mice. Steve Troughton-Smith, the developer who first discovered the feature, suggests it works with Apple Magic Trackpad as well.

New WCAG iOS settings for motion sensitivity and color blindness

 iOS 13 is by far Apple’s greatest push for accessibility. Alongside greater capabilities for voice commands and mouse support, the new iOS will help users who suffer from motion sensitivity and color blindness. Older iOS versions introduced the “Reduce Motion” setting, which assisted users by disabling weather effects in the Weather app and turning off the system Parallax effect, and iOS 13 builds on those. 

The new release allows users to disable “Auto-Play Video Previews” and prevents videos from automatically starting in the App Store and other Apple applications. This was possible already in the App Store settings, but now Apple has rolled this feature out to apply to all Apple apps, as well as third-party apps through a new API for developers.

Once the “Reduce Motion” setting has been enabled, another motion sensitivity setting called “Prefer Cross-Fade Transitions” can be turned on, which gives a user a new, smoother transition when navigating apps instead of the usual lateral screen transition animation.

Another new feature of iOS 13 is the introduction of the “Differentiate with Color” setting, which Apple is incorporating from Mac. Found in the “Display and Text Size” section of the Accessibility settings, this feature is designed to assist users who are colorblind by distinguishing between certain colors that may be critical in understanding or using aspects of the user interface. Developers using this setting can replace a color indication with a UX design that doesn’t rely solely on color.

The tidbits of Apple’s accessibility news

One feature that did not make the headlines but is nevertheless important includes moving the Accessibility menu to the front page of the Settings for iOS 13, making it now part of first-run “setup buddy” experience. These are small updates individually but it speaks volumes to see one of the most powerful tech companies in the world devote so much focus to increasing accessibility to users of all types.