One of the reasons I'm such a fan of Apple is that they don't just make pretty products for people with money to burn.
They make great products that tend to raise the ceiling of the entire tech industry.
So when Apple champions accessibility, it tends to normalise features that I suspect, if we lived in a parallel universe without Apple, would not exist at all.
Today I saw Apple announced a feature for Apple TV that enables the user to bring up sign language interpretation for certain supported movies and TV shows.
Initially I thought "wait, why is that even news?" While I don't specifically seek out sign language interpreted shows, I have seen them many times in the UK on usual terrestrial television.
But then I realised, these shows have the sign language interpretation baked in. You must watch the show with sign language, or you don't have it at all.
The ability to bring up a sign language interpreter optionally, as a separate layer on top of the show, is such an obvious approach for how we watch TV today. TV is no longer an analogue stream of pictures sent over the airwaves but a stream of bits that interact with software running on computers disguised as TVs. So it's refreshing to see how sign language can be embraced in this brave new world.
A few things I love Apple's implementation:
- The feature is toggle-able on or off. I am not too familiar with how people use sign language when watching a typical TV show but I can imagine it must be quite refreshing to be able to optionally switch it on or off at the tap of a button.
- The interpreter is placed on top of the content with their own background cut away. So they're not inside a box that would take up more space unnecessarily. I assume that depending on settings, the size of the interpreter could be scaled up or down.
- The implementation appears to be easy to discover and access, which can only be a good thing for increasing the awareness and adoption of sign language. There is no need for one to depend on sign language in order to learn more about it!
- There appears to be a huge appreciation and respect for the medium of sign language, and I admire that Apple has implemented this feature with a level of human craft and care that is unique to each show.
- The interpreters are real people (not uncanny valley AI droids) translating an art form for a new audience. There is nuance and emotion that just cannot be outsourced to the machine.
- The icing on the cake is that they're introducing this feature alongside a highly relevant movie — Being Heumann. This to me is just Apple showing off at this point. It's a level of alignment and synchronisation across multiple teams within a multi-trillion dollar company that most teams of even five people would crave. This also massively helps drive awareness of the feature — distribution, even for Apple, is everything.
Again, this is Apple at its best.