Amazon Announces New ‘Adaptive Display’ feature
I missed the news earlier this month, but Amazon on April 15 announced the all-new Fire TV Stick HD. The $35 device is touted as the company’s “slimmest ever streaming device” and features Fire TV’s redesigned user interface as well as the Alexa+ service.
Amazon’s announcement was made in a blog post written by Isaac Schultz.
“The new Fire TV Stick HD is Amazon’s slimmest streaming device—both smaller in volume and width than previous models,” Schultz wrote. “It’s optimized for Direct Power through a TV’s USB port, so it fits more neatly behind a TV without requiring a separate power adapter.”
He continued: “Fire TV Stick HD also delivers noticeable speed improvements compared to previous HD models—more than 30% faster on average than the last-generation HD stick, which means it turns on and opens apps more quickly. It comes with Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.3 support to help ensure a stronger, more reliable connection for customers.”
From an accessibility perspective, the new streaming stick has a cool new feature Amazon calls Adaptive Display. Schultz says the feature, which will arrive in “the coming months,” is “an accessibility feature that makes text, menus, and content easier to see and navigate on screen.” When enabled, Adaptive Display enlarges UI elements such as text and menus while “proportionally scaling content artwork,” Schultz said. Adaptive Display, he added, “[creates] a more balanced browsing experience,” with multiple options available so users can customize their experience.
Pocket Lint’s Craig Donaldson wrote a nice piece this week on Adaptive Display.
“I’ve been in plenty of situations where the text on my TV screen with a Fire TV Stick was simply too small to read, and Adaptive Display aims to fix that by offering multiple size options to enlarge on-screen text, as you can see in the images above,” he reported on Monday. “The first image shows a larger Adaptive Display option, the second a smaller one, and the third the default size.”
At a high level, Adaptive Display strikes me as conceptually similar to the Display Zoom function on iOS. When you first set up an iPhone (or iPad), the system prompts you to choose your desired zoom level. On my iPhone Air, there were three: Normal, Medium, and Large. (Strangely, the Settings app shows only two: Larger Text and Default, which is what I use.) I like having the stock UI layout, then tweak text sizes on my own in the Accessibility menu. As far as I know, tvOS has no such analogue; Apple would do well to add their own version of Adaptive Display for the Apple TV 4K. As to Amazon, kudos to them for their work here. I know lots of people lament Fire TV as a glorified ad platform, but the truth is Amazon deserves flowers for its work in making Fire TV and more as accessible as possible. All these years later, I maintain the Fire TV Cube is a credible, albeit expensive, option for people with disabilities to choose—what with the box’s ability to control one’s home theater setup and change channels in apps like YouTube TV by using one’s voice vis-a-vis Alexa. While Fire TV indeed may be riddled with ads, there are a lot of good ideas in there—especially concerning accessibility.
