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Wwdc 2021 watch9/2/2023 ![]() Why can't we just ask Disney to work with us to make some of these voices? Disney actually said, "Yeah, let's work on this." Well, not only was it going to be recorded in English, but it was going to be recorded in more than 30 languages. I said, "We gotta do something about this." It's 9:41. I remember I was in a presentation, and I was sitting in the back row behind someone, and they were talking about the Mickey Mouse watch face, and I heard a woman in front of me say, "Oh, I just really wish I could hear Mickey speak." And I turned to the engineer who was there with me. So the Mickey Mouse watch face, when it was introduced, I think it really surprised everybody, especially because it even had some really neat little features like Mickey's tapping his foot, but to a low-vision or blind audience, if I touched the watch, all I would get is a description, or maybe, perhaps, the time spoken by the same text-to-speech I hear everywhere else on the watch face, and that's just not good enough. But we've learned that there's more to accessibility than pure technology solutions. That's a very, very simple solution, but it solves a very, very important problem. And hear the time, and then I don't have to stop or jeopardize my safety.ġ:09 p.m. And I thought, "Well, that could be very dangerous, right?" So one of the things I thought is, "Man, it would be really great if I could -just raise my hand." - 1:04 p.m. When we were testing, one of the things that I noticed right away sort of walking around and using the device, if I was mobile, I had to take one hand off of my cane, stop, and then touch my device. Part of the thing about making the Watch accessible is what is the primary function? One of those things was telling the time quickly, and sometimes discreetly, so that's where Taptic Time came into play, which is a feature that we have that allows a user to feel out the time using the haptics played back to them. It's actually better than having a big screen." When you sort of invest in accessibility, you have to look at things from a different perspective, and so that often leads to features that become mainstream over time, and I think the Apple Watch is a great example of showing a lot of those things, from the large-type watch face which was designed for low-vision users but it's available for everybody. ![]() So she came to us and said, "You know, what's really great about the Watch is that I can read the email on this really small screen because all my vision is focused in this central area. So one of the great things about making a product accessible by design is that you do things that you may not think are necessary, and I'm reminded of a story of a woman that I met who had Usher syndrome. Well, it turns out that was also important for low-vision users, and it's great for the person who needs that accessibility, but it also turns out to be useful for everyone else. To make it something accessible, you really wanna look at- what is the product supposed to do? What is its core mission of what this is gonna bring value for? So when you look at that for the Watch, that's when we start to realize, like, all right, how do we make this more accessible for someone who's blind? What do we do for someone who's low-vision? And how do we do it on a CPU the size of a postage stamp? Apple developed this product, and the primary focus was to be able to read the time, and so the contrast with the black background with the legible letters was very important. It also has a long history of what its use is for, and what its functions are. The Watch is a unique kind of computing platform. If you can create not just a good accessibility experience, but a great accessibility experience, you'll have a fan for life. We care because they push the boundaries of the experience in a way that we can't imagine. Are we doing something in this area where we should have a different accommodation? Do we have something that we need a special assistive technology to provide a different way to interact with this device? How do we make the whole world accessible? Every day, we're thinking about accessibility. And we look at all those segments and try to think about how they impact each product. At Apple, we like to think of accessibility touching four different broad categories- vision, cognitive, motor, and hearing. ♪ ♪ So our goals have always been to build great accessibility into all of our products because many of us navigate our lives in different ways.
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