Honestly as a blind person and blind developer myself, most of these features get a shrug at best. For one, there's already a bunch of third-party apps that do most if not all of this (Seeing AI, Envision AI, BeMyEyes, Aira, etc.). So at best, this does what all those apps are doing but faster and on-device, which may or may not mean it is also more inaccurate, we'll have to see. In the meantime, Mac OS's screen reader, VoiceOver, has been left to essentially exist in maintenance mode for years, where users have had to build, arguably impressive, third-party solutions to add features to the thing that comparable screen readers on Windows have had for a really long time.

Through that lens, this all looks a bit performative to me, but again, maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised.

The one thing I'm mildly excited to see is the improvement to Voice Control, as guessing what the programmatic name of a button is or having to constantly use a numbers grid to target elements doesn't sound fun.

To respond to what I see in some of the comments:

- On speech rate: It does take quite a bit of practice to crank up the speech rate and there's a degree of retraining you need to do when you switch voices. A lot of more "human" sounding voices are harder to follow at super high speeds which is why a lot of people prefer more robotic but consistent speech and generally aren't convinced by AI-powered TTS yet; they often fall apart if you raise the speech rate past a certain point. - Re: actually waiting for the target audience's verdict: This is so important. I see more and more companies, individuals etc. talk about accessibility, build accessibility solutions and evangelize AI for accessibility without EVER talking to the people they claim to help. This will almost certainly mean mistakes will be made, up to and including doing more harm than good. If you want to do accessibility right, that includes AI products of any kind, hire people with lived experience or you'll get the equivalent of machine-translated text, hackerproof security in one click or an AI-powered coffee bar that orders thousands of rubber gloves. Coincidental note: I have time for new projects right now :P