The more such a service gets attention from regular media (instead of the niche, targeted audience it aims to serve), I fear it'll be another case of "why we can't have good things".

Here if I understand you don’t get access to support but to an interpreter who will call the support for you. It’s of no interest if you don’t know ASL

They were able to confirm the issue was on AT&T’s end, give me the exact language to use when talking to AT&T, and were nice and easy to work with. At one point they needed a picture of something and I braced myself for what that process would look like, it was stupid simple, they sent me an email with a link to upload the picture. It literally couldn’t have been easier but I don’t think most support places could have accomplished that task.

I have been an Apple customer for well over a decade and that ABM experience blew me away and made me happy I had gone with iPads for my business over cheaper Android tablets (one of _many_ reasons).

They’re obsessive about quality, they treat design and customer experience as first class parts of the process, they invest heavily in long-term R&D, they have world leading support - they’ve basically done the opposite of what every financial analyst and business consultant in the world thinks is the right move, and as a result they’re worth more than Saudi-Aramco, and yet somehow every company out there is still sprinting in the exact opposite direction of how Apple operates.

Because Apple's way works does not mean other ways do not. Those other ways are way easier and cheaper, and businesses are fine chasing lower hanging fruits.

I think Tesla is the closest to trying to follow their model, in a much scrappier way of course.

- ship 90% solutions to learn very early what doesn’t work - iterate and make changes very rapidly to the product

This can be seen in the model 3, which has had significant variations even within a year. Both improvements (better fit and finish) and likely mistakes (deleting lidar).

The same is seen on the SpaceX side. The starship launches were wildly successful despite the catastrophic endings. This can be seen in the live streams of the employees cheering wildly at the end (which completely baffled armchair critics).

I’m on the fence if this is a good way to run companies long term, but the general point is that it’s about as far from Apple’s culture as you can get.

The only difference is that Jobs and later his deciples were able to blow smoke up your ass, and sell the obvious incomplete product as focusing on some other distraction, or something. Clearly the reality distortion field worked.

Panel gaps or whatever at Tesla are obviously something they know about, it's not like nobody at Tesla is aware that their fit and finish doesn't match a Mercedes S-Class.

Whereas Antennagate is something that shouldn't have escaped the lab, I can't really a similar incident with Tesla.

The recent Starship explosion was a success, if you want to see the cost of avoiding rapid iteration when it comes to rockets look no further than the SLS.

I might receive some slack here, but I gave it a try (I don't know ASL). Within 5 seconds of clicking the button, I was connected to a live human, with both my video and sound, as well as the other person's, turned on (although I did have the ability to switch them off). There was no intermediate step to filter out spam calls. I did cut the call quickly though to avoid wasting their time!

ASL is a more common language for deaf people in Francophone communities than LSQ.

One of the more common examples from teachers is the sign for SLOW. On the west coast, we sign it as the flat palm being pulled slowly back along the extended non-dominant arm. But in the south and parts of the east, it is signed as the Y sign, thumb against the cheek, being tilted forward.

The way you fix this casually is to ask the other person to finger spell or mime what they meant. I can't see AI being able to do that well for a while but maybe..?

in practice that's all difficult, if at all possible -- but just sayin; we have decently good speech interpretation at this point, perhaps we aren't far from self-training ASL against something similar.

Not trying to be trite, but I imagine you don't know ASL. It is an extremely loose and context dependent language really. I am sure it can be done eventually, but I still think it's very far off in terms of recognition. Would love to find out more about the state of the art for ASL or BSL recognition though.

I wish “accessibility” wasn’t such a dirty word for most people (thinking it’s only for “disabled” people, or people with a problem). Accessibility is for everyone and I encourage people to dig into that section of their phone settings. Most people will be surprised at what is there and that there are probably 1-2 things at a minimum that they might be interested in turning on for themselves.

People using that floating assistivetouch button when they have a damaged screen/home button was huge too.

I think most non-technical people either don't know they're there or view them as hidden extra features. (which they kinda are, for things like mouse support)

Apple is actually pretty behind in accessibility on desktop from what I've seen. Their apple designed peripherals (kbb/mouse/etc) are extremely anti-accessible and seem to be designed for the youngest and coolest crowd with zero thought for anyone with any disability. Unlike Microsoft, they do not sell any accessibility or disability focused peripherals. And their OS doesn't make accessibility a first class experience.

Third party support for hardware and software is massive for accessibility, and OSX is notoriously bad for third party support. Major third party peripherals from the biggest companies often have pretty bad support, and so the accessibility minority gets the short end of a short stick on OSX.

Blind users who want to use Windows most often end up needing to pay over a thousand dollars for a JAWS license, since the built in accessibility software isn't very good. Remote support from them costs an additional $200.

https://www.freedomscientific.com/products/software/jaws/

Apple includes full featured accessibility software with the device, and free support for it as well.

1: my understanding is that blind folks DRAMATICALLY prefer JAWS to the built-in OSX tools by an overwhelming margin, something like 9 to 10. That suggests that the OSX tools are extremely inferior if nearly everyone feels obligated to spend.

2: You can literally get a windows computer AND add $1000 license to it and still pay as much or less than a OSX computer. My M1 MBP cost well over $2000! You could put JAWS on a windows computer for $1500 or less. Just pointing out the extreme, extreme cost difference for accessibility users with OSX vs Windows! You can't even get into OSX for under $1k these days, and even then, it's rough and you should spend more.

> I'm surprised to hear that "Apple has committed to accessibility in a way that no other company comes close to for decades" because Microsoft has already been doing that for over a decade"

The accessibility features built into Windows are just terrible, so your premise doesn't track.

Also, Amazon was selling an M1 Macbook Air for $750 this week, so you can get the hardware and the software cheaper than just buying the additional software you would need to make Windows at all viable for a blind user.

Low effort quoting empowering false arguments. I'm disappointed in you.

I also said:

>Third party support for hardware and software is massive for accessibility, and OSX is notoriously bad for third party support. Major third party peripherals from the biggest companies often have pretty bad support, and so the accessibility minority gets the short end of a short stick on OSX.

And arguably "third-party support" was the biggest plank in my entire argument and the core problem with accessibility in OSX: worst-in-class support for third party hardware and mediocre support for third-party software.

To ignore the largest part of my argument to target an intentionally misunderstood snippet is intellectual malice, completely unserious, and undeserving of a serious reply.

Please re-read my comment which extensively discusses hardware, peripherals, price, and software (both first-party AND third-party support) if you want to have a serious discussion with me.

It’s very confusing to me because of all I’ve read about Apple accessibility but she says she finds Android much easier to use!

I understand that talking could be much more quick/fluent in a person to person interaction, plus it doesn’t need any technical means of writing, whether pen and paper or a computer. But isn’t technical support a rare use case where typing speed is not a big bottleneck and where also writing things out can help precision and cut down on having to repeat yourself? Given that resources are always limited, wouldn’t it be better to invest in accessibility where that the most impact?

Accessibility is about meeting people where they are, rather than just trying to cater to the lowest common denominator by finding “workarounds”. Apple already provides a technical chat service, and I’m quite sure deaf people are capable of using it. Is people are choosing to use this Video Relay service, its for a reason, presumably because they find ASL easier to work with than written language. Perhaps it’s an age thing, personal preference, or maybe they have other difficulties that make reading and writing difficult. But forcing people to use the cheapest form of communication simply because catering to their needs is a “corner case” isn’t providing accessibility, it’s ignoring the needs of individuals because they’re inconvenient.

I previously worked at a video relay service company (VRS in the US is a service paid for by the TRS fund through the FCC, and allows Deaf and hard-of-hearing people to make phone calls through video-chat with a ASL interpreter). In written English-based interactions with Deaf and hard-of-hearing colleagues, there is often a communication barrier as there often is with anyone speaking a second language.

In my personal experience working on tickets written by D/deaf colleagues, while sometimes we could communicate by whiteboard or text-based chat, it was indispensable to have the option to discuss the ticket with someone who could interpret present.

As a bonus more people would learn ASL.

I suppose if you were on an airplane you could avoid disturbing other passengers, but I don't expect many people to actually use VR on airplanes.

And if you're not out in public, you can use speech recognition more easily than learning ASL.

I learned ASL, as a hearing person, to be able to communicate with deaf friends anywhere and with my (hearing) spouse and other friends in noisy or large places. It's also a hedge against my future potential hearing loss from tinnitus.

Automatic interpreting wouldn't solve any of those and neither it nor automated captions take the place of human-understood interpreting. I think putting ASL in something like VR where it is more visible to the hearing world might broaden its reach?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_relay_service

And then fall back to interpreting when more expertise is needed - with the added benefit of having a baseline understanding of the topics discussed.

Apparently they got it in year 2015.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37890187

https://pastebin.com/NAnMzk3P

You can of course find pages via Google:

site:*.apple

https://www.signapse.ai/

I'm sure that's not too far off though. I expect it would be somewhat limited until sane conventions evolve for adjusting the grammar to English/user-language. (or sidestep that, and just display and store messages using memoji)

How many people find the video of the guy easier to understand than the text saying King's Cross - 14:29 - Cancelled?

https://static.wixstatic.com/media/c30a4d_0430c75ba26545c0b7...

I totally get that it's useful to have a separate sign language for communicating in person. But machine translating English text into a video of a person signing when the original English text is right next to it? Does anyone find that useful? How many people know ASL/BSL but can't read English?

Not related, but as a deaf person fluent in ASL-- where do I find people to talk to online these days? Where I live now (NW Europe) _ there is sadly no one to talk to.

Most places don't have ASL interpreters on-call or even to any degree among their staff, and often rely on external companies to provide (often pre-booked) ASL interpreter sessions to D/deaf clients.

It's really nice that Apple is making this available so easily and accessibly, and in-house. Just being able to click and connect to an Interpreter is a great improvement in accessibility for ASL users.

It’s super easy for someone to get confused between example.apple and example.app/le (since both .apple and .app are TLDs)

They did this with music first, now this.

https://learn.applemusic.apple/apple-music-classical

(And it’s further confusing because sometime .apple redirects to .com)

What’s the logic Apple uses to decide between .com or .apple TLD usage?

Rest assured - anything under .apple brand TLD is Apple's.

https://www.apple.com/legal/intellectual-property/tld/regist...

With modern browsers, I don't think this is a problem anymore. Subdomain attacks and query length attacks have already made browsers put address shenanigans mitigations into the address bar.

[1]: https://data.iana.org/TLD/tlds-alpha-by-domain.txt

I don't recall the last time I saw a spam/phishing attempt that was this sophisticated ... mostly they are things like www.apple-support.com which is ironically for sale right now.