Apple Just Dropped Tons of New Accessibility Features for iPad

Controlling your iPad with just your eyes is finally a (built-in) thing, but so are many other capabilities that you might have never thought possible.

In a news release on Wednesday, Apple announced a slew of new accessibility features, including everything from controlling your iPad using only your eyes to controlling your Apple Car Play apps with your voice. Not for the first time, some of these updates include AI and machine learning enhancements.

Eye Tracking is the shining star of this news. Apple's new feature uses AI and the front facing camera on an iPad or iPhone to track your eye movements and Dwell Control to let you 'click' or 'select' items on the screen. You'll also be able to use your eyes to complete gestures like 'tap' and 'swipe.'

Other exciting AI-powered features include Vocal Shortcuts, which lets you assign an "utterance" or sound to a shortcut to complete tasks. There's also Listen for Atypical Speech, which uses on-device machine learning to recognize speech patterns. This means that even more people will be able to use their voice with their iPad or iPhone, even if they experience "progressive conditions that affect their speech."

“Artificial intelligence has the potential to improve speech recognition for millions of people with atypical speech, so we are thrilled that Apple is bringing these new accessibility features to consumers,” said Mark Hasegawa-Johnson, the Speech Accessibility Project at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign’s principal investigator.

Additional features introduced in the announcement include Music Haptics to make songs more accessible to those with low hearing, motion sickness controls for those who have a hard time using their iPhone or iPad while in a moving vehicle, CarPlay accessibility updates that let you use your voice to control more apps, and additional new visionOS updates.

Voice-over, Magnifier, Braille Screen Input, Hover Typing, Personal Voice, Live Speech, Virtual Trackpad, and several other accessibility features also received updates.