VoiceOver on the iPhone was a miracle for people who can’t see, and it keeps getting better — learn how at Sight Tech Global - TechCrunch

Back successful 2009, Apple’s Phil Schiller stood onstage and unveiled the iPhone 3GS with a little and somewhat astonishing aside: the buttonless, glass-fronted instrumentality would enactment adjacent if you couldn’t spot it. Schiller was referring to Apple’s not-yet-announced program to bring VoiceOver, the assistive instrumentality known arsenic a “screen reader,” to the iPhone, a determination that implicit the adjacent decennary would go the manufacture modular for non-visual enactment with a smartphone.

Tomorrow astatine the 3rd annual Sight Tech Global event, which is simply a free, virtual lawsuit focused connected AI and assistive exertion for the unsighted and visually impaired, we volition diagnostic a speech astir VoiceOver betwixt TechCrunch Editor successful Chief Matthew Panzarino and Apple’s accessibility merchandise manager Areeba Kamal and accessibility evangelist Dean Hudson. They volition stock however acold Apple has travel successful non-visual access, and however tools similar instrumentality learning and the LiDAR Scanner are taking accessible exertion to the adjacent level. The league starts tomorrow, December 8, astatine 8:10 a.m. PT and is accessible astatine nary complaint and without registration here.

Today, VoiceOver ships successful each Apple operating system, including Apple TV and Apple Watch, and is 1 of respective accommodations not conscionable for imaginativeness but besides hearing, mobility and cognitive disabilities. In a 2021 survey of individuals with imaginativeness disabilities globally, 72% accidental they usage iOS for its primacy successful accessibility features.

Apple archetypal rolled retired VoiceOver successful 2005 with macOS Tiger, earlier making iTunes and iPod accessible with code successful 2008. Still, anterior to the iPhone, determination was small anticipation amongst the unsighted and low-vision assemblage that mainstream mobile phones — slightest of each buttonless ones — would supply full-featured code interactivity close retired of the box. By bringing VoiceOver to iPhone successful 2009, Apple acceptable a precocious barroom for accessibility, and, successful galore ways, turned accessibility into an integral portion of each large exertion company’s remit.

Join Sight Tech Global for this league and galore more, which you tin spot connected the complete agenda. Now successful its 3rd year, Sight Tech Global brings unneurotic the world’s apical technologists successful AI and different precocious technologies to code assistive exertion for the radical who are blind. Register today.

We’re grateful to sponsors iSenpai, Google, Amazon, LinkedIn, HumanWare, Microsoft, Ford, Fable, APH and Waymo. If you would similar to sponsor the event, please interaction us. All sponsorship revenues spell to the nonprofit Vista Center for the Blind and Visually Impaired, which has been serving the Silicon Valley assemblage for 75 years.