Today, Apple announced a new set of accessibility features coming to its iPhones and iPads “later this year,” so presumably these will be part of iOS 18 and iPadOS 18. which will be officially unveiled next month.
By far the most interesting of the bunch is eye tracking, which is supported on both iPhones and iPads, and lets you control the devices with your eyes, as the name implies.
This is aimed at users with a physical disability, but everyone will be able to use it. Eye tracking is made possible by AI (because everything has to be now). Initially you go through a seconds-long calibration phase that takes place via the front camera, and then you're good to go. All data used for this never leaves your device as it is powered by on-device machine learning.
You don't need any additional hardware or accessories and eye tracking works with any app. It allows you to navigate through the elements of an app with your eyes and use Dwell Control to activate each element by dwelling on it with your eyes.
Then the Taptic engine in your iPhone plays taps, textures and refined vibrations, all tailored to the music you're listening to, and this reminds us of Sony's similar feature that debuted many, many years ago, except Apple's Music Haptics works initially only with Apple Music. However, it will be available as an API for developers to make music more attractive in their own apps, if they wish.
Most intriguingly, Apple also announced Vehicle Motion Cues, a feature that should help reduce motion sickness for passengers who are in moving vehicles and using their iPhone or iPad.
This will place some animated dots on the edges of the screen representing changes in the vehicle's motion, and this will somehow help alleviate motion sickness, although it's not explained exactly how, but we'll look into it to learn more about this feature.
CarPlay also gets voice control, which does exactly what the name implies: you can navigate CarPlay and control apps using just your voice, sound recognition for people who are deaf or hard of hearing to be notified of horns and sirens, and color filters for the color blind .