At Apple we use machine learning to teach our products to understand the world more as humans do. Of course, understanding the world better means buil

Making Mobile Applications Accessible with Machine Learning

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2021-05-20 15:45:26

At Apple we use machine learning to teach our products to understand the world more as humans do. Of course, understanding the world better means building great assistive experiences. Machine learning can help our products be intelligent and intuitive enough to improve the day-to-day experiences of people living with disabilities. We can build machine-learned features that support a wide range of users including those who are blind or have low vision, those who are deaf or are hard of hearing, those with physical motor limitations, and also support those with cognitive disabilities.

Mobile devices and their apps have become ubiquitous. And, for the estimated 15% of the world population with a disability, many capabilities and services offered by apps remain inaccessible.

To provide benefit to users, accessibility features on mobile platforms need apps to provide complete and accurate information that describes user interface (UI) components. But, many apps do not provide sufficient descriptions for accessibility features to work as expected. When developers don’t provide accurate information on individual UI elements, parts of the app are not accessible. This could result in VoiceOver being unable to read a paragraph, or Switch Control being unable to activate a button. In some cases, an entire app cannot be accessed by users with disabilities.