Many people find themselves helping older friends or family members with reduced physical or cognitive capabilities. Adam Engst distills advice from a pair of TidBITS Talk discussions that asked about the best iPhone and simplifying the iPhone experience for older people.

Apple has announced a slew of new and improved accessibility features that it plans to bring to the next versions of its operating systems in 2023.

Apple has released a compelling short video that showcases some of what its accessibility technologies make possible for people with disabilities.

Don’t be fooled by its location in Settings > Accessibility. AssistiveTouch is more than just another accessibility feature. Instead, it’s an always-available shortcut to numerous actions on your iPhone and iPad.

Apple has pre-announced some exciting new accessibility features for its future operating systems, several of which may be highly useful for non-disabled users.

In addition to the work Apple does in providing explicit accessibility features, Steven Aquino notes that many of the marquee features of Apple’s upcoming operating system updates provide notable benefits to users with disabilities.

Already the leader in accessibility for its various devices, Apple has announced many more that will be available in the coming months.

Deep in the Accessibility settings of iOS 14 is a new feature called Back Tap that lets you assign a variety of system and accessibility actions—and anything you build in the Shortcuts app—to a double or triple tap on the back of your iPhone.

The author describes his experience in setting up and using “Made for iPhone” hearing aids. The integration works, but in daily life not every usage aspect is obvious.

At MacTech Conference, automation guru Sal Soghoian gave a talk in which he revealed how, with the addition of just a Luna Display dongle, anyone can use built-in macOS accessibility features to turn an iPad into a touch-sensitive custom controller for the Mac.

In the wake of Nuance discontinuing its Dragon Professional Individual speech-to-text software for the Mac, we shine a light on some ways that macOS’s built-in speech recognition needs to improve to provide a viable alternative.

Faced with a display that was getting whiter and brighter, Adam Engst finally realized that he had been inadvertently increasing the Display Contrast slider in the Accessibility preference pane via a keyboard shortcut.