Apple Marks Global Accessibility Awareness Day With Preview of Accessibility Nutrition Labels, Magnifier for Mac, More Forthcoming Features
Ahead of Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) later this week, Apple on Tuesday announced what it calls “powerful accessibility features” for its expanse of operating systems. The company says the new software is slated for release “later this year,” but it doesn’t take a Kremlinologist to surmise these looming enhancements are obviously for iOS 19, visionOS 3, et al, when the updates ship in the fall. Notably, the 2025 edition of Apple’s annual GAAD announcement is special: this year marks 40 years that the company has worked on building assistive technologies for its disabled customers.
“At Apple, accessibility is part of our DNA,” Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive officer, said in a statement. “Making technology for everyone is a priority for all of us, and we’re proud of the innovations we’re sharing this year. That includes tools to help people access crucial information, explore the world around them, and do what they love.”
There are two headliners this year: Accessibility Nutrition Labels and Magnifier for Mac. For the former, the Nutrition Labels are effectively identical to the privacy ones currently available; Apple says the accessibility labels are designed to give users “a new way to learn if an app will be accessible to them before they download it, and give developers the opportunity to better inform and educate their users on features their app supports.” The Accessibility Nutrition Labels will be available on the App Store worldwide, with Apple noting “developers can access more guidance on the criteria apps should meet before displaying accessibility information on their product pages.” As to the latter, the longstanding Magnifier app for iOS and iPadOS is making its way to macOS this year. Its implementation is clear in inspiration, as Apple essentially took the building blocks for Continuity Camera on iOS and tvOS to make Magnifier for Mac. The company boasts the feature will be a boon to people with low vision (like yours truly) to understand the physical world more accessibly. It’s one thing to describe it, but it’s another thing entirely to see it; to that end, Apple has made a video showing a person with albinism using Magnifier for Mac, with their iPhone clipped to their MacBook’s display, taking notes in a college classroom during a lecture. Magnifier for Mac integrates with another new feature this year, called Accessibility Reader, which, with Magnifier, will “[transform] text from the physical world into a custom legible format.”
The coming advent of Accessibility Nutrition Labels is a huge step towards facilitating greater awareness—and accountability—of accessibility and the disability community writ large. It’s a sentiment shared by American Foundation for the Blind president and chief executive officer Eric Bridges, who’s quoted in Apple’s GAAD press release.
“Accessibility Nutrition Labels are a huge step forward for accessibility,” he said in a brief but pointed statement. “Consumers deserve to know if a product or service will be accessible to them from the very start, and Apple has a long-standing history of delivering tools and technologies that allow developers to build experiences for everyone. These labels will give people with disabilities a new way to easily make more informed decisions and make purchases with a new level of confidence.”
Elsewhere, Apple announced Live Captions are coming to Apple Watch, Zoom is coming to Vision Pro, a new Name Recognition feature, and much more. Beyond the forthcoming software updates, the company is also celebrating GAAD with accessibility-oriented material across its plethora of retail and digital properties. For instance, the company has shared a behind-the-scenes look of the new Apple TV+ film Deaf President Now. The documentary, out this Friday, chronicles the 1988 student protests which compelled Gallaudet University to appoint its first-ever Deaf president despite existing for more than 120 years at that point in time. I posted an interview with Nyle DiMarco and Davis Guggenheim last week, who told me all about the film and the protests’ deeply-felt cultural significance to the deaf and hard-of-hearing community.
My friend Stephen Hackett shared an especially astute, and poignantly so, perspective on today’s accessibility news out of Apple Park. He writes on his 512 Pixels blog “in a timeline where a lot of folks have …complicated… feelings about Apple, seeing the company to continue [improving] access to technology for everyone is still great.”
Apple is neither above criticism nor a monolith. There are plenty like Sarah Herrlinger.
“Building on 40 years of accessibility innovation at Apple, we are dedicated to pushing forward with new accessibility features for all of our products,” Herrlinger said, who serves as the company’s senior director of global accessibility policy and initiatives. “Powered by the Apple ecosystem, these features work seamlessly together to bring users new ways to engage with the things they care about most.”
Somewhat fortuitously, today’s news out of Cupertino is complemented by a report from Rolfe Winkler of The Wall Street Journal that Apple is purportedly hard at work on developing brain-controlled interfaces, or BCIs, to assist people with motor disabilities. In his own story on Winkler’s reporting, 9to5 Mac’s Chance Miller notes researchers believe BCIs have profound potential to “revolutionize” the use of computers by people coping with ALS, for example. Miller also writes Apple is expected to “add broader support for BCIs” to its longstanding Switch Control feature at some point this year.
