Apple At 50: Accessibility is innovation too
Apple turns 50 years old today. The company was 5 when I was born.
My friend John Gruber reports today Apple’s homepage features a nice animation to commemorate the occasion, while CEO Tim Cook posted to X with what Gruber describes as “VHS-style ‘rewind’ through Apple product history.” Then there are two other Apple community friends in Shelly Brisbin and Stephen Hackett, both of whom wrote “Apple at 50” retrospectives today for Six Colors and 512 Pixels, respectively.
Then there’s mine, this very piece.
Take a gander at Curb Cuts’ archives and you’ll notice I posted 34 times in 31 days last month. That’s a lot of journalism. Take a closer gander at said archives and you’ll note the majority of my coverage in recent weeks has been on Apple. In my opinion, to cover Apple means covering Apple—and the company’s history is inextricably tied with the disability community and accessibility. Apple turned 50 today, but it was actually in 2025 the company marked its 40th anniversary of its accessibility initiatives. Ask any accessibility professional not inside Apple Park and most, if not all, will shout from the proverbial rooftops the company is the unquestioned leader in the industry when it comes to conceiving and shipping best-of-breed accessibility software for its panoply of platforms. Apple lives staunchly in Secretariat at the Belmont territory. I’ve heard it said myself many, many times in interviews with accessibility leaders at companies big and small—in one way or another, everyone looks to Apple for lessons on how to do accessibility right. People wax romantic about the original iPhone in 2007 being a revolution of the first order, and it truly was. Those people probably don’t realize there were zero bespoke accessibility features in iPhone OS 1.0, and would have none until the iPhone 3GS came along in 2009. Yet, for my druthers anyway, the phone’s giant-for-its-time 3.5” screen and Multi-Touch user interface were eminently more accessible than the flip phone I used at the time. I vividly remember standing in my local Cingular Wireless store and being blown way by the demo iPhone; I originally had planned to buy an iPod touch alongside an upgraded cell phone, but knew the iPhone was my destiny from the moment I first used the legendary “Slide to Unlock” control.
It truly was a seminal moment for me.
That first iPhone was my first-ever Apple product. It would be the Trojan horse for me to switch to the Mac from Windows. Then I’d spend the next few years scouring Twitter and Apple’s website during my break times from the classroom at work on media event days to marvel at, say, the all-new iPhone 4. I was utterly mesmerized by Steve Jobs’ stage presence and by the technology, of course. I would always think about how cool it’d be to be in the room covering those events—I’d blog about them in the evenings after school—never dreaming that, in a few short years, Apple PR would literally call me with an invitation to my first-ever press event. What I’m saying is, Past Steven never dreamed I’d get to go to one, let alone become a regular attendee at countless more.
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Apple’s innovation oftentimes get lionized in four main tiers: the Mac, the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad. macOS is generally heralded as the apex of human-computer design. As software goes, however, accessibility gets left in the dust when giving Apple roses because it’s esoteric and niche and, in my view, most people just aren’t comfortable talking about it beyond the occasional “gee whiz, this is neat” platitude in blog posts and on podcasts. But I’m here to tell you as a person who’s coped with multiple disabilities my whole life, accessibility features—whether from Apple or others—are literally life-changing, innovative designs. These are things which enable more types of people to enjoy their iPhone Air or MacBook Neo or whatever. More pointedly, accessibility is an incubator for innovation. As I’ve shared numerous times over the years, popular features like the mouse pointer in iPadOS the Double Tap in watchOS, and even Type to Siri in Apple Intelligence owe their life to Accessibility; according to sources, these functions were handed off to the wider OS team from the Accessibility group so as to massage them to have more mainstream applications. Accessibility is admittedly not conducive to juicy “sources said” reporting, but the insider knowledge is instructive insofar as it affirms the idea that disabled people are technologists. As Dr. Victor Pineda told me in 2024, things like audiobooks, to name just one example, wouldn’t be so popular with the masses if not for my community.
Apple isn’t perfect in accessibility, to be sure—especially if you take a few minutes to peruse this year’s AppleVis report card. Again, though, Apple makes mistakes and people like me and Stephen Hackett still adore its products. The salient point is simply that not only are the actual software pieces good, that Apple does go so hard in prioritizing accessibility is the company walking the walk. Apple is dignifying people like me—a group who lives on the margin’s margin societally—and acknowledging that we’re human and utterly deserving of top-flight computing experiences. Tim Cook, Craig Federighi, and company aren’t compelled by law to make the iPhone accessible; the Americans with Disabilities Act focuses on the physical world, with the legislation’s father in retired congressman Tony Coelho (D-CA) telling me in 2020 the digital realm is unquestionably its Achilles heel. Absent of an amendment to the law—not even remotely likely in the current political climate—it matters that Big Tech companies like Apple care so much about providing for those in need. At the very least, better accessibility ultimately begets a better bottom line for Cook and Kevan Parekh. Put another way, it’s heartening that Apple care about accessibility every single day of the year in a way that, as GAAD co-founder Joe Devon told me last year, most companies sideline but one day of the year in Global Accessibility Awareness Day.
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The people I’ve spoken to, mostly off-the-record, who serve on Apple’s executive team, have been ardent in their advocacy for Apple’s accessibility work. From Tim Cook on down, the ethos funnels throughout the entire organization. From Apple’s retail outposts to its employees to Apple TV to even accommodations during events, that accessibility is part-and-parcel of the company’s culture is abundantly clear. It’s my understanding that, as software is concerned, the conception and building of new and improved accessibility features ranks right up there as an all-hands-on-deck, A1 priority as preparing the newest flagship iPhones each and every year. It’s serious.
Steve Jobs died around a year-and-a-half prior to my pivot to tech journalism, so I neither shook his hand nor interviewed him or took a selfie with him at media shindigs as I have with Cook. I like to think, though, Apple’s work in accessibility stands as an exemplar of Jobs’ insistence that Apple functions at the intersection of technology and liberal arts. Were he still in the moral realm as Apple’s executive chairman or something, I like to think he would be fucking delighted and proud at features such as Voice Control and its ability to empower literally everyone to use their Apple device(s).
Now if only we could get disability inclusion vis-a-vis accessibility as a beat to be richly acknowledged in newsrooms. If you can hire AI reporters, you can hire for accessibility.
