After a few controversial ads, Apple is back with a four-minute video promoting its products’ accessibility features. It highlights how the iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch can help athletes and parathletes from the moment they wake up until they exercise or perform other activities throughout the day. This ad comes just after the Olympics ended and the Paralympics are about to start.
In “The Relay” ad, Apple puts eight athletes with and without disabilities to compete against each other in two teams. Before they compete, the company shows how these people use their Apple products and how the accessibility features help them.
With the Apple Watch, Apple promotes sleep metrics, daily exercise goals, double-tap, and other accessibility features. In addition, the company promotes the iPhone’s Point and Speak feature for users with low vision and AssistiveTouch, which helps those with upper-limb differences to use the Apple Watch one-handed.
In the video’s description, Apple says, “Apple products are designed for every body. Whether you’re a sprinter, wheelchair racer, track cyclist, or swimmer, features like the Workout app on Apple Watch, sleep metrics, and daily exercise goals — along with the ability to record and analyze your performance on iPad and Mac — ensure that all athletes have what they need to train and compete at their best.”
When athletes and parathletes start competing by the end of the ad, Apple wants to show how both of them can achieve their goals, as no limitation can stop them in a competition.
It’s important to note that Apple always adds new accessibility features to its products. For iOS 18, the company announced a few months ago some of the newest functions coming later this fall, which include:
- Music Haptics: Music Haptics is a new way for users who are deaf or hard of hearing to experience music on the iPhone. With this accessibility feature turned on, the iPhone’s Taptic Engine plays taps, textures, and refined vibrations to the music’s audio. Music Haptics works across millions of songs in the Apple Music catalog and will be available as an API for developers to make music more accessible in their apps.
- Wide Range of Speech: With Vocal Shortcuts, iPhone and iPad users can assign custom utterances that Siri can understand to launch shortcuts and complete complex tasks. Listen for Atypical Speech, another new feature, gives users an option for enhancing speech recognition for a wider range of speech.
- Vehicle Motion Cues: Vehicle Motion Cues is a new experience for iPhone and iPad that can help reduce motion sickness for passengers in moving vehicles. With Vehicle Motion Cues, animated dots on the edges of the screen represent changes in vehicle motion to help reduce sensory conflict without interfering with the main content.
- CarPlay gets Voice Control: Accessibility features coming to CarPlay include Voice Control, Color Filters, and Sound Recognition. With Voice Control, users can navigate CarPlay and control apps with just their voice. With Sound Recognition, drivers or passengers who are deaf or hard of hearing can turn on alerts to be notified of car horns and sirens. For users who are colorblind, Color Filters make the CarPlay interface visually easier to use, with additional visual accessibility features including Bold Text and Large Text.
