AppleVis Extra 67: a Conversation with Sarah Herrlinger and Dean Hudson of Apple's Accessibility Team

In this edition of the AppleVis Extra, Dave Nason and Thomas Domville are joined by Sarah Herrlinger, Director of Global Accessibility Policy and Initiatives at Apple; and Dean Hudson, Accessibility Evangelist at Apple. Topics covered in this podcast include an in-depth look at new accessibility features coming later this year in Apple software for blind and low vision users, as well as a broader look at Apple's approach to making their products accessible to as many people as possible.

Full transcript of podcast

Please note, This transcript was created solely for communication access. It is not a certified legal transcript and is not entirely verbatim.

[music]

Announcer: This is the AppleVis Extra.

Dave Nason: Hello, and welcome to AppleVis Extra. This is episode number 67 coming hot on the heels of episode number 66 which was our round-table about WWDC keynote on Monday.

Today, myself, Dave Nason, and my colleague, Thomas Domville, also known as Anonymouse, are delighted to be joined by two people from Apple live from WWDC conference this week. We have the head of accessibility at Apple, Sarah Herrlinger, and we have one of the accessibility technicians called Dean Hudson.

Thomas, thanks for joining me. We're delighted to be getting the chance to interview these guys today.

Thomas Domville: Definitely! I am so excited to meet with these two. I know that we are going to learn a great deal of things today, and I hope our listeners will, too. It's going to be a lot of fun.

Dave Nason: Yeah, it was a big keynote, wasn't it? We talked about a lot on Monday. People can listen to that podcast for the full details of what we talked about in our immediate kind of aftermath, but there was a lot there.

Thomas Domville: Definitely! A lot to soak up, and even today I'm still soaking things up, and hearing things that we didn't really pick up on on the WWDC day itself.

As we're starting to get our hands on these betas, more and more things are starting to pop up. This makes this even more exciting of a podcast to listen to.

Dave Nason: I think we all know that iOS 12 was a performance update. I think whether you had accessibility needs or not, it wasn't a feature-rich release last year. This year, I think there's a bit more there in the accessibility world as well, and in general when it comes to features. I think we're going to have plenty of questions.

Thomas Domville: Definitely! I think that what I came away with from Monday was a lot of people were saying "Is that all?" "Is that it?" I was like oh, my gosh, are you kidding me? There was a lot there. I think for every 1 thing they mentioned, there were probably 20 things they didn't mention. There is so much under-the-hood. Like you said, this is a vast difference, a stark difference, between last year's iOS 12 to this year iOS 13.

That is the same for those with accessibility. There are quite a few small changes, and new things that we can expect which I'm very excited to talk about.

Dave Nason: Indeed!

Let's welcome our two guests! We have, all the way from California in the middle of WWDC week ………………they've taken the time out to talk to us. We have Sarah Herrlinger, and Dean Hudson.

Do you guys want to tell us a little about yourselves? Dean, do you want to go first, and tell us who you are, and what you do?

Dean Hudson: Yeah, sure. Thanks for…