GitHub’s ‘General-Purpose Accessibility Agent’
GitHub’s Eric Bailey wrote last week in a blog post about the company’s efforts to build what’s called “a general-purpose accessibility agent.” The program is deemed “experimental,” with the pilot reinforcing GitHub’s commitment to accessibility.
“It is an understatement to say agents have become a popular way of working with code,” Bailey said on Friday. “GitHub has adopted agent-based code creation and editing for many of its initiatives, including piloting an agent to help with our commitment to accessibility.”
Apropos of GitHub’s ethos, Bailey’s post is pretty technical in nature. He cogently states up front, though, the accessibility agent has two primary goals: (1) provide engineers with reliable, timely answers to accessibility-centric questions; and (2) identifying and remediating issues prior to code going into production. The agent has reviewed 3,535 pull requests with a 68% resolution rate thus far, according to Bailey.
Notably, the “Mindset” section of Bailey’s post is well worth a shoutout.
“The social model of disability teaches us that access barriers—and consequently impairment—can be created because of how an environment is built. The same thinking applies to digital experiences,” he wrote. “With the accessibility agent, we are not attempting to ‘solve’ accessibility in isolation. We are instead attempting to augment our peers’ efforts, to better help them remove the barriers that may be created as a result of how we construct GitHub’s user interfaces.”
Bailey continues to say the accessibility is no silver bullet that can magically fix everything, adding “understanding, honoring, and socializing this better helps set the agent’s scope of responsibility.” This approach, he noted, has helped a lot to “[speed] up the experiment’s launch, leading to more buy-in for the effort.”
More poignancy from Bailey: “To say it plainly: Organizations will be at a disadvantage if they have not already invested in manually identifying and remediating accessibility issues. There are many reasons for this, including building an accessibility agent. To that point, GitHub has a mature system in place for logging accessibility issues, as well as verifying fixes to issues are working as intended.”
For all the handwringing in some design spaces about the rise in prominence of artificial intelligence in software development leading to perhaps trading craft for expediency, there can be no denying the impressiveness of the technological feat in things like, say, Claude Code to aid programmers in their work. By the same token, this rise is also beneficial for coders with disabilities who, for instance, may be unable to endure long work sessions that involve producing hundreds of lines of code. To have the ability to give an agent a few-sentence prompt of what they need or what and have it virtually instantaneously generated is a remarkable assistive technology. And to GitHub’s efforts, the idea that leveraging AI to help track accessibility when writing code is to lean on a computer’s greatest strength: automation. Humans can do only so much, so the one-two punch of the proverbial man and machine can only help to make computers and the internet more accessible to disabled people. As I’ve written in the recent past, ChatGPT did a lot to assist me, the decided non-web developer, generate CSS/JavaScript code for Curb Cuts’ visual design. The chatbot gave me good code, too!
Relatedly: My 2023 interview with GitHub accessibility boss, Ed Summers.
‘NHL × ASL’ Nabs two sports Emmy Nominations
Mark J. Burns reported for Sports Video Group this past week the National Hockey League’s NHL Productions has been nominated for two Sports Emmys—double last year—in the Outstanding Live Sports Special: Non-Championship Event and Outstanding Interactive Experience: Sports categories for its NHL × ASL series, of which the league has produced 19 since debuting with the 2024 Stanley Cup Finals.
“The big-time productions, currently in their third year at the league level, are dedicated to the Deaf and hard-of-hearing community and are part of an effort to make NHL games more accessible and give more hockey fans an opportunity to experience the sport,” Burns wrote.
“To be honored with two Emmy nominations in one year is incredibly meaningful,” said Matt Celli, group vice president and coordinating director at NHL Productions. “The team is very humbled to be nominated for two Emmys, especially when you look at the other finalists. We are proud of the recognition and prouder of our ability to service this community. We know that we are producing a truly special and unique show for the Deaf and hard-of-hearing hockey fans. The impact is real, and that makes this rewarding.”
Not only have I been watching this year’s Stanley Cup playoffs on ABC/ESPN/TNT, I’ve covered the “NHL × ASL” extensively over the last few years; it meshes my love of sports with my personal background as a CODA whose native language is American Sign Language. The league works alongside Deaf inclusion company PXP in creating the ASL simulcast, and I interviewed its co-founder and CEO, Brice Christianson, in November 2024 all about it. Like me, he’s a CODA, and effusively praised the NHL for its commitment to making hockey inclusive to the Deaf and hard-of-hearing community.
This year’s Sports Emmys awards are scheduled for May 26 in New York City.
EU iPhone Users gain ‘proximity pairing’ in iOS 26.5
Juli Clover reported earlier this week for MacRumors iPhone users in the European Union (EU) now have access to various interoperability features such as the AirPods-like pairing process, as well as notification forwarding for third-party wearables. The features were included with the advent of iOS 26.5, also released publicly this week.
“iOS 26.5 introduces several interoperability changes for third-party wearables, which means European iPhone users have access to new capabilities when using non-Apple accessories,” Clover wrote on Monday. “To comply with the EU’s Digital Markets Act, Apple is letting third-party wearables access some features that have historically been limited to the Apple Watch and AirPods.”
From an accessibility standpoint, the so-called “proximity pairing” feature is most relevant in my purview. Clover describes it as “[bringing] a set of earbuds that support the feature near an iPhone will initiate an AirPods-like one-tap pairing process so third-party wearables like earbuds will no longer require multiple steps to pair.”
The multi-step process Clover refers to is having to navigate to the Bluetooth portion of Settings, find the device(s) in the list, and then tap its name to initiate a connection. In an accessibility context, that can be a lot of steps for someone to take to pair their non-Apple earbuds with their iPhone. Pointedly, it introduces a rigamarole of cognitive/motor/visual movements that adds friction to the experience; one of those is hard enough, but some combination thereof can plausibly be untenable in terms of literal strain. Part of the “magic” of AirPods is the setup flow itself, one which functions as a de-facto accessibility feature. Not only does pairing happen automatically, Apple takes it a step further by leveraging iCloud to also propagate pairing with one’s other constellation of devices in their personal Apple galaxy. As I’ve written many times before, most nerds and tech reviewers beam about this setup process as one of convenience—and they’re not wrong in saying so—but accessibleness and convenience are not one and the same. In other words, what’s convenient to you—something akin to the free breakfast at Hampton Inn, for example—may well be utterly life-changing to me in terms of enjoying AirPods. It should be obvious there exist people with disabilities in the EU who yearn for a more accessible setup procedure.
Of note, Clover writes accessory manufacturers are responsible for “[adding] support for the interoperability updates, so they may not be available right away.”
Apple introduced its AccessorySetupKit API in 2024 for third-party developers to use.
Report: ‘Severance’ Season 3 Due ‘Much Sooner’
Jake Kanter and Nada Aboul Kheir reported last week for Deadline the next season of Severance is planned to premiere “much sooner” than Season 2 did in January 2025. The comments were made by star Adam Scott, who gets top billing as Mark S. in the show, during a red carpet interview at this year’s BAFTA TV Awards, held in London.
As Kanter and Kheir noted, there was a three-year wait between the end of Season 1 and the release of Season 2. According to Scott, “we’re always trying to shorten the amount of time between seasons, but it’s more important for it to be great than for it to be fast.” He also said the production team is “definitely planning” on getting the third season out sooner than later while conceding the aforementioned gap was “too long.”
Severance absolutely is on my seemingly ever-growing list of shows to rewatch, but I may move it further up the list after writing this post. It is undoubtedly one of my most favorite TV shows of the last few years, maybe even of all-time. Many of my favorite movies and television shows are Apple TV properties; Dickinson, For All Mankind, The Morning Show, and CODA are numerous other titles I also dearly love. My jaw hit the floor at the end of the Season 2 finale—no spoilers from me here, go watch it yourself—and I can’t wait for the day Apple announces the start date for Season 3. Praise Kier.
Season 3 will begin shooting “very soon,” Scott added.
As I wrote last month about Ted Lasso returning, immersing myself in known quantities like my favorite shows is one way of practicing self-care as I try to stay afloat amid my oftentimes dark battle with maintaining my highly precarious mental health of late.
Deadline posted a clip to X with Scott’s comments on Season 3. I’ve embedded it here.
See Clarus the dogcow Walk
Okay, this post admittedly has nothing whatsoever to do with accessibility.
My friend Stephen Hackett writes today at 512 Pixels Apple’s Clarus the Dogcow now has four legs and can walk, thanks to today’s update of the Developer app ahead of this year’s WWDC in a few weeks. The update, which gives the cross-platform app a Liquid Glass glow-up, also brings with it several WWDC-themed stickers for people to use in iMessage. One of them features the aforementioned Clarus—just look at it!
One perk of running your own website is covering a thing out of sheer adorableness.
Relatedly, don’t miss Hackett’s video on the history of Clarus (embedded below).
Nascent ALS Drug Shows ‘Remarkable’ Progress
Pam Belluck reported last week for The New York Times about a “milestone” ALS treatment drug and its effect in “[helping] some patients improve.” Belluck’s story centers on 58-year-old Amanda Sifford, a school psychologist living in Florida.
“It was May 2023, and the Food and Drug Administration had just approved the first therapy for a genetic form of A.L.S., even though clinical trial results had not yet proven the drug would be effective. The drug, tofersen, made by Biogen and marketed as Qalsody, targets the form of A.L.S. that Ms. Sifford inherited, so Dr. Carberry and Dr. Michael Benatar, the executive director of University of Miami A.L.S. Center, scrambled to establish a clinic to administer it,” Belluck wrote. “She began receiving tofersen monthly, through infusions into her spinal canal.”
Notably, there are caveats to this genuinely good news, Belluck said. The first is tofersen is intended only for “a small subset of patients” as it targets only 2% of ALS patients. Second, the drug is exorbitantly expensive, costing $15,500 per monthly dose. Third, research into tofersen is in its earliest days; again, the sample size is small and the drug only stabilizes or slightly improves—it doesn’t reverse or perform miracles. Nonetheless, The Times’ headline is not clickbait; it is remarkable progress.
Indeed, people like Sifford are “exhausted but grateful” following the injections.
“I’ve gotten a chance to help find treatment for something that killed my father and my grandfather,” she said to Belluck. And “I’m alive.”
I covered ALS extensively over the last several years for my old Forbes column. I interviewed ex-Bachelor contestant Sarah Trott twice about leaving her job as a television news anchor to become a full-time caretaker for her father, who had ALS. Trott called ALS “the absolute worst disease that I’ve seen firsthand” in our November 2022 interview, adding the tolls caregiving takes on family—mentally and physically—can be as disabling and debilitating in its own right. (As someone whose mom died from cancer, I can attest to this. Caretaking is brutal.) Her father died in October 2021.
Waymo is ‘The best thing Since sliced bread’
Adela Uchida of CBS affiliate KEYE-TV in Austin reported this week about staff members at the Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired “finding freedom” in riding Waymo. The story centers on Marcus Cardwell, a receptionist at the school.
Cardwell staunchly believes Waymo is “the best thing since sliced bread,” as it helps him get around on his own with agency. He said, in part, reclaiming his independence is “absolutely important” because “you don’t ever like to feel like you have to wait on someone else when something’s important.” He added it’s normal for those in the Blind community to perpetually wait at the mercy of public transit, friends, etc.
“The future-looking thing to where you kind of feel that, even if people are busy and there’s not a person available to you, that there may be an autonomous car available,” Cardwell said.
Emily Coleman, the school’s superintendent, expounded on Cardwell’s sentiments.
“Mobility is probably one of the biggest barriers to employment, recreation,” she said. “And so having more ways to access independence is just always a positive change for your community.”
Coleman continued: “They had never gone anywhere by themselves, because you always need a driver,” she said. “You always have to be on a bus, like you’re never alone and in charge of your own independence. And it was the stories about like, wow, that was my first time ever alone in a car.”
The full interview with Cardwell, et al, was posted to KEYE’s YouTube channel.
I’ve said it numerous times, but it bears repeating: Waymo is unequivocally a revolutionary technology for accessibility. While it is obviously important to address problems like Waymo vehicles blocking traffic and becoming better, safer drivers, to unilaterally want to ban them, or dismiss their viability, is shortsighted and reeks of privilege. The fear of riding in an self-driving vehicle is one thing, and entirely understandable, but city leaders—in Austin, San Francisco, or anywhere else Waymo is running—should take a step back and seriously consider what Waymo enables for the disability community. Again, there are issues—if you’re a wheelchair user, for example, you’re excluded from the experience—but for people like Cardwell (and myself!), Waymo is a revelation of the highest order. That shouldn’t be minimized—but it is.
Apple’s Swift Student Challenge Winners Build apps Amplifying Accessibility
In a Newsroom post published on Thursday, Apple highlighted four winners of its annual Swift Student Challenge for their work in building apps with accessibility in mind. The brief profiles come 31 days until this year’s WWDC kicks off on June 8.
“Receiving real-time feedback while giving a presentation. Escaping a flood zone in Accra. Playing the viola, without the physical instrument. Drawing on iPad without worry of tremors. These are just four of the solutions that this year’s Swift Student Challenge Distinguished Winners created with their winning app playgrounds,” Apple wrote in the lede. “The annual Swift Student Challenge invites students from across the globe to bring their ideas to life through original app playgrounds built with Apple’s easy-to-learn Swift coding language. This year’s 350 winning submissions represent 37 countries and regions, and showcase a wide range of technologies.”
One of the students Apple spotlights is 20-year-old Gayatri Goundadkar. She spent her formative years drawing and painting with her grandmother in India, sharing a passion for a centuries-old painting technique called Warli. As Goundadkar’s elder began to age, however, her hands started shaking to the point she could not paint as she loved to do. Alarmed by the loss, Goundadkar embarked on developing an app for the iPad called Steady Hands, which Apple describes as “an app playground that uses Apple Pencil stabilization to support individuals with tremors in creating art.” The app, she said, is targeted at older adults, and uses the PencilKit API in iPadOS to “analyze stroke data and recognize tremors” and is capable of distinguishing between an intentional stroke versus an unintentional mark. “Every drawing is then displayed in a personal 3D museum, because I wanted them to feel like artists, not patients,” Goundadkar said. “When users saw the stabilization working, they felt more confident.”
For Apple’s part, the company is proud of the efforts from Goundadkar and the others.
“The breadth of creativity we see in the Swift Student Challenge never ceases to amaze us,” Susan Prescott, Apple’s vice president of worldwide developer relations, said in a statement included with today’s post. “This year’s winners found remarkable ways to harness the power of Apple platforms, Swift, and AI tools to build app playgrounds that are as technically impressive as they are meaningful. We’re incredibly proud to support their journey and can’t wait to see what they create next.”
Goundadkar and the others are invited to Apple Park to watch the keynote.
Sandwich Introduces Hovercraft for mac
Adam Lisagor of Sandwich has announced a new macOS app called Hovercraft.
The app, $19 for one Mac and $29 for two, uses hand gestures to control one’s slide decks during video presentations. There are keyboard shortcuts too, but the app’s raison d’être is it “hovers” around you as you speak, easily accessible via gestures.
“Pick Hovercraft as your camera in Zoom or wherever. Reach up, pinch the air, pull the window where you want it,” reads Hovercraft’s pitch on its website. “Your face stays on camera. The slide sits next to it. No screen share. No option-tab. No corner thumbnail.”
I discovered Hovercraft by way of this Jason Snell linked item on Six Colors. I find it really interesting because the gesture-based interaction model portends well for accessibility. Granted, it’s been eons since last I gave a presentation—in person, no less—but that doesn’t undercut the broader point here. Presuming one is able to learn and perform the gestures in the first place, to use one’s hands to move through a slide deck and reposition the window can remove a lot of friction with heightened cognitive load and excess clicking, etc. It can be difficult to cognitively stay on task and manage the “backend” of a presentation whilst also remembering salient talking points, not to mention using a mouse or trackpad or clicker to cycle through the slide deck itself and make sure screen-sharing is behaving itself. For people with certain disabilities, to do all this work in real-time may well be the technological equivalent of climbing Everest or Kilimanjaro; thus, Hovercraft could be a lifeline in successfully reaching the summit.
Overall, Hovercraft strikes me as highly evocative of Vision Pro’s gestures, not to mention the head gestures on AirPods Pro. As someone who quickly acclimated to visionOS I imagine learning Hovercraft wouldn’t be difficult. Lisagor and team ought to be commended not only for the damn clever name, but for the idea of using gestures.
Report: iOS 27 To allow pass creation in wallet
Mark Gurman reported for Bloomberg earlier this week Apple is purportedly going to allow people to create their own passes within the Wallet app come iOS 27. The feature let users “take a QR code and generate a custom pass around it,” he wrote on Monday.
“The capability is designed for situations where, for example, a gym or concert app provides a QR code for entry but doesn’t support the Wallet app,” Gurman said of the feature. “With the new tool, users can import that code and create their own pass.”
He continued: “Users can create a pass from scratch or rely on the iPhone’s camera to take a QR code and turn it into a digital ticket. The feature includes customization tools for styles, images, colors and text fields, allowing users to tailor the information displayed on each pass. Apple is testing three template options: standard, membership and event. Standard, in orange, is a default option for any type of pass, while membership, in blue, is geared toward entering places like gyms. The event pass, in purple, is meant for tickets to games, movies and other occasions.”
I have quite a bit stored in Apple Wallet: my debit card, health insurance card, even my California ID and US passport, alongside a Starbucks card, a Clipper Card, and the digital key for my house—and yes, I still carry my physical wallet everywhere I go. What piqued my interest about Gurman’s story was, if at all possible, if I could use the “create a pass” thing to build one for my CalFresh card. As it currently stands, I must use my physical card in stores when I want to use my SNAP benefits to get groceries; I can use the card terminal, but it’s a pain in the ass because (a) most I’ve encountered don’t accept the chip on the card; and (b) swiping the magnetic strip sorely tests my hand-eye coordination. It’d be far better, and more accessible, if I could simply tap my iPhone or Apple Watch as I’m using the self-checkout. Not only would this method be convenient and expedient, it’d remove a barrier to independently paying for my food.
There exist apps on the App Store for managing one’s SNAP benefits—the most popular one, across several states, is ebtEDGE and it’s truly terrible—which is good for the maintenance aspect. I recently discovered Propel and like it much better for management, finding resources, etc. I need someone to make Flighty for food stamps. But managing one’s benefits is a wholly different task from actually using those benefits in everyday life. In practice, California (and others) should consider making the CalFresh card compatible with Apple Wallet—if not for accessibility’s sake, for modernity’s. As a person with disabilities, such a move would make buying groceries in-store more accessible. I don’t know how technically feasible it is, but theoretically anyway, it sounds great I could maybe use the aforementioned pass creation feature to circumvent the Luddite bureaucracy and manually add my SNAP card to my phone.
iOS 27, et al, is widely expected to be unveiled by Apple at WWDC next month.
On the marvelousness of markdown
Paul Thurrott wrote last month he “may or may not” write a book on Markdown.
“I may or may not write and publish a short e-book about Markdown sometime this year, most likely as part of a monthly focus,” he wrote on his website back on April 5. “But l’ve written small parts of it already, as I do, and I figured it might be interesting for at least some readers. And so here’s an early draft of an introductory chapter that may or may not be called ‘On writing.’ We’ll see.”
As I said on Mastodon, it’s nearly impossible to overstate how meaningful Markdown has been to my journalistic career, as well as my writing in general. I have vivid memories of writing umpteenth essays in high school on a school computer running Windows 3.1; I used WordPerfect, and I have even stronger visceral memories of what a pain in the ass it was to format things in rich text. (For context, I was in high school from 1996–2000.) All I knew was a word processor, be it WordPerfect, Microsoft Word, or even Apple’s Pages. Then about a year or two before I pivoted in 2013 to doing tech journalism full-time, I would write about Apple on my own little WordPress blog—fundamentally not dissimilar to what I do here at Curb Cuts, but without the name recognition I’ve earned over my career. I remember not wanting to use rich text, and happily discovered Markdown. I taught myself the syntax, loved its simplicity, and the rest is history. With few exceptions, every single word I’ve written for the last 15 or so years destined for the web have been written in Markdown—albeit much to the chagrin of precious few editors who’ve emailed me perplexed at the markup of my freelance drafts. In fact, one of my earliest bylines was this June 2013 piece for TidBITS about how Markdown makes writing a more accessible endeavor for me. It was a thrill to see my friend (and Markdown creator) John Gruber link to said story on Daring Fireball and say the piece “made my day.” We would meet in person in 2014 at XOXO in Portland, OR.
What app do I use nowadays? My favorite is MarkEdit on the Mac, but I like iA Writer too.
Apple Announces Newest Pride Collection
Apple this week announced its latest Pride Collection for Apple Watch. As usual, this year’s Pride Collection features a new band, watch faces, and wallpapers for iPhone.
“The new Pride Edition Sport Loop, available to order today, is woven from a rainbow of 11 colors of nylon yarns,” Apple said in a Newsroom post on Monday. “The intricate weaving blends one color into the next, creating depth and movement across the band. The resulting design is joyful and vibrant, showcasing a full spectrum of colors that reflect the unique identities that shape LGBTQ+ communities worldwide.”
The Pride Edition Sport Loop costs $49 and will be available beginning “later this week,” according to Apple.
The reason I’m covering this story is, in an accessibility context, I love the Sport Loop. Although I have a ton of Sport Bands dating back to the Apple Watch’s 2015 debut, the Sport Loop is without question my all-time favorite band. As someone with lackluster fine-motor skills, the infinite adjustability of the it’s-Velcro-but-don’t-call-it-that fastener is so easy to use. In the very early days of Apple Watch, I used to need to ask for help getting my watch on because the Sport Band is somewhat fiddly—which I didn’t like because I was giving away part of my personal agency. With the coming of the Sport Loop, the adjustability and self-adhesive nature of the material helped reclaim said autonomy. It reasserted my own independence as a person with disabilities, and broadly speaking, is a prime example why Apple Watch bands are undoubtedly an integral part of the product’s accessibility story. And from a pure stylistic sense, I’ve always fancied myself a low-key band collector; to wit, every time Apple seasonally refreshes the colors, I’m always keen to see the new colors and find out if there’s any I like. In fact, I have my eye on the 46mm Blue Mist Sport Loop. (I also own several Pride Edition bands from prior vintages, which I think are pretty cool too.)
The Pride Edition wallpapers are purportedly coming with the release of iOS 26.5.
Pride Month is next month.
Understanding the iPhone Air Isn’t Difficult
Matt Birchler believes the iPhone Air belongs to the nerds. His blog post, published over the weekend, comes following a report from Hartley Charlton at MacRumors about smartphone makers being “spooked” by the lackluster sales of the iPhone Air—so much so Apple’s rivals are abandoning plans for their own thin-and-light versions.
“We [enthusiasts] are not buying the Air because it represents the best value in the lineup or because it has the best specs you can get in an iPhone,” Birchler wrote. “You buy it because you believe that phones in the future will be thinner and lighter, and this specific device makes some significant sacrifices just to get you that feeling today.”
Birchler’s piece caught my eye because he hits on something I’ve been thinking about for awhile regarding the Air. To wit, I deliberately chose to upgrade to the Air last September—the sky blue, 1TB model on AT&T—precisely because it was appreciably thinner and lighter than, say, the iPhone 17 Pro. Intellectually, I understood the Air was not at all a bad phone, yet undeniably a worse one compared to the higher-end Pros; but that makes sense, and it explains why Apple’s product lines are stratified. Of course the most expensive iPhone is gonna be the best one from a technological standpoint. Again, though, for my use as a person with disabilities, the tradeoff for an ostensibly inferior phone was gaining the Air’s hallmark thinness and lightness—which, in everyday, practical use is an eminently sensible decision given the chunkiness of the 17 Pro. The Air is much easier to hold and carry around in my pocket, and it has a nice big screen to boot. I love my Air, despite still having misgivings over the single camera versus the three on the Pro. The Air is great for accessibility in my opinion, and it’s a great value if you consider it’s greater than the sum of its parts.
The Air’s svelte stature is the reason you choose it over the other iPhones, full stop. That’s why I don’t understand the “I finally get the iPhone Air” trope. What is there to get? The Air is actually a fucking good phone—but you don’t buy it looking for better battery life or, as I mentioned, better cameras. You buy it because it’s almost incomprehensibly thin and light and you want to lean into that attribute. In other words, buy something else if you can’t, or won’t, do so. Indeed, Birchler rightly acknowledges the majority of mainstream buyers can’t comprehend paying more for less for the Air versus something like the base iPhone 17. That’s a reasonable stance, but it reaffirms the notion you pick the Air with the utmost intention of loving its form over its function.
Supreme Court Rules in favor of reinstating access to abortion Pill Via Mail
Ann E. Marimow reports today for The New York Times the Supreme Court has ruled access to the abortion pill via mail be reinstated, at least temporarily. The pill, known as mifepristone, had been obtainable only by visiting an in-person doctor’s office.
“The Supreme Court on Monday restored nationwide access to a widely used abortion medication in a temporary order that will, for now, allow women to once again obtain the pill mifepristone by mail,” Marimow wrote. “In a brief order, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. paused a lower-court ruling from Friday that had prevented abortion providers from prescribing the pills by telemedicine and shipping them to patients, causing confusion for providers and patients. The one-sentence order imposes a pause until at least May 11. He requested that the parties file briefs by Thursday, and then the full court will determine how to proceed.”
Louisiana sued the Food and Drug Administration to restrict access to mifepristone because “the availability of the medication by mail has allowed abortions to continue in the state despite its near-total ban,” according to Marimow. The drug accounts for almost two-thirds of all abortions in the United States, the administration of which is a two-drug process given during the first three months, or 12 weeks, of pregnancy.
This news is obviously first and foremost a women’s health issue—abortion is a form of healthcare—but it’s also very much an accessibility issue in the disability sense. Like ordering from Amazon or UberEats, for instance, that a woman with disabilities could plausibly gain access to their abortion medication through the mail is, on its own merit, an eminently more accessible way to get it. Maybe getting to a doctor’s office is logistically and/or medically fraught. Maybe their condition(s) means they’re primarily homebound. Maybe there’s a mental health issue that makes leaving one’s house difficult if not impossible. Whatever the reason(s), the salient point is simply that home delivery of medication—mifepristone or not—is, at its core, all about greater accessibility. It should go without saying, especially in modern times, but here we are.
Relatedly, the Center for Reproductive Rights put out a press release last Friday wherein the nonprofit organization shared news on the aforementioned Fifth Circuit ruling limiting access to mifepristone. The Center noted requests for the abortion pill via telehealth services has “doubled” since Roe v. Wade was overturned in June 2022, adding the now-paused ruling “jeopardizes that lifeline.”
“Telehealth has been the last bridge to care for many seeking abortion, which is precisely why Louisiana officials want it banned,” Nancy Northup, president and chief executive officer of the Center, said in a statement included with the announcement. “This isn’t about science—it’s about making abortion as difficult, expensive, and unreachable as possible. Telehealth has transformed healthcare. Selectively stripping that away from abortion patients is a political blockade.”
Justice Dept. Extends Web Accessibility Deadline
Michelle Diament reported for Disability Scoop last month the Trump administration has kicked the can down the road regarding what was the late April deadline for compliance with web accessibility mandates under Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). The Justice Department issued an interim final rule on the matter that extended the deadline a full year, with the new date set for April 26, 2027.
“The original rule, which the Justice Department finalized in 2024, imposes first-ever technical standards for websites and mobile apps under Title II of the ADA,” Diament wrote on April 20. “The requirements apply to online offerings from state and local government entities ranging from courts to public hospitals, parks, libraries, police, transit agencies, school districts, universities and more.”
According to Diament, school districts and other organizations felt immense pressure from the ruling who said they were “unprepared to meet the original timeline.” Likewise, the Justice Department noted it “overestimated the capabilities” of said organizations to comply with the law, both practically and technologically. Disability advocates, however, are choosing to view this give-us-more-time rationale as nothing more than excuses-laden lip service, arguing, according to Diament’s story, “the rule was under consideration for more than a decade before it was finalized and that delaying its implementation will harm the very individuals who it is intended to help.”
“Years of notice have not been enough, and now the department is rewarding inaction with more time,” Maria Town, president and CEO of the American Association of People with Disabilities, said in a statement to Diament. “Every year of delay is another year that a person who is blind cannot apply for the benefits they’re owed, that a person with an intellectual or developmental disability cannot navigate a local agency’s website, that a deaf constituent cannot access critical public safety information.”
In my opinion, both arguments can be true: there are challenges in complying and they were given ample warning. To comply with the Justice Department’s ruling is to spend a not-insignificant amount of money in ensuring your technology is up to par. By the same token, edicts like this wouldn’t be necessary if there didn’t exist structural ableism such that school districts and the like viewed accessibility as this ancillary, extraneous thing to be bolted on at a later date—quite literally so in this case. Put another way, the needs of people with disabilities are, by and large, ill-considered unless and until some governmental entity of authority says to consider it—and more often than not, compulsion towards compliance is more motivation of avoiding lawsuits than it is about engendering empathy and inclusiveness. Look no further for a real world proof of concept than 99.9% of so-called “accessible” hotel rooms strewn across America. Many, arguably the majority, do just enough such that the bare minimum qualifications are met—again, to comply with the ADA to avoid getting sued.
I interviewed Town back in 2020 to discuss the ADA turning 30, Covid-19, and more.
Joanna Stern’s ‘New Things’
It was reported by Talking Biz News in early February longtime Wall Street Journal (WSJ) personal technology columnist Joanna Stern was leaving the storied outlet. Stern had been with the WSJ since 2013, fortuitously the same year I started working in media.
“Joanna’s been a brilliant colleague on our tech beat and on our video team, bringing a sharp, unmistakable energy and voice to our coverage,” Emma Tucker, the WSJ’s editor-in-chief, said in a statement on Stern’s departure. “We’ve loved her distinctive take on the industry, and while we’re sad to see her go, we’re delighted that she’ll continue to contribute for us and we wish her the very best as she heads off on a fresh new adventure.”
Life gets busy, so we don’t connect as often as we’d like, but Joanna has not only been a years-long peer of mine in tech journalism—she’s also become a close friend. I’ve been an admirer for her work for so long, and her mine; we’ve seen each other at many Apple events over the years and have been in briefings together, sitting across the table from one another. We even shared a selfie together from an Apple Park golf cart during WWDC a couple years ago. That’s the personal and professional camaraderie, but Joanna’s also long been an advocate of accessibility in tech and the industry-wide efforts to continually make technology ever more empathetic and inclusive to all.
As her friend, I feel compelled to plug Joanna’s new thing: New Things. She has a newsletter, a YouTube channel, a forthcoming book, and even editorial standards. I’ve admittedly been lax on pre-ordering the book for terrible, no-good, very bad reasons, but I have subscribed to Joanna’s channel. I highly recommend doing all three posthaste, and I also highly recommend watching her video (embedded below) wherein she explains why she decided to leave the Journal to go at it independently.
Incidentally, this week marked my 13th anniversary as a journalist—all indie. I’m neither as cool nor well-known as Joanna, and probably never will be, but nonetheless very proud of the trail I’ve blazed in making accessibility a bonafide beat in tech journalism.
A few Stealth Upgrades to Apple home
In more news this week from 9to5 Mac’s Ryan Christoffel, he wrote a piece about a few under-the-radar enhancements Apple has made to the Home app during the iOS 26 cycle. The reason I’m covering his story is because there are a couple which have strong pertinence to accessibility. (If ever you wonder how I get my story ideas…)
“Apple is expected to launch a wave of new Home products later this year, after iOS 27 brings Siri’s long-awaited overhaul,” Christoffel wrote. “But there are three ways Apple Home has recently gotten better during the iOS 26 cycle too. Here’s what’s new.”
The first feature was new in iOS 26.2, released back in December: one-time setup for multipack accessories. Christoffel describes this as “convenient,” and he’s not wrong, but the accessibility angle is arguably more important. For its part, Apple says the feature “lets you use the same setup code to easily enroll multiple accessories when sold together.” It’s not a Home product, but I immediately think of AirTags here. You can buy a 4-pack of them, but you must set up each one individually. How cool would it be to have a QR code or something on the back of the box that, when scanned with your iPhone, adds all four to your Apple Account and asks how you’d like to divvy them up? To Christoffel’s point, it is convenient and certainly expedient—but it’s also more accessible! To wit, it’s much better to set up the AirTags all at once than deal with them piecemeal; the reason for this is because it reduces some amalgamation of cognitive/motor/visual friction, depending on one’s needs and tolerances. Put another way, this multipack accessory setup functionality makes for a nicer, smoother first-run experience which ultimately portends positivity. As Christoffel notes, the feature applies to Home goods like smart plugs, lightbulbs, motion sensors, and more.
“I’m always a fan of changes that make setups easier,” he said.
The second feature involves Apple Home Key. Christoffel writes about the first product to support Home Key and Ultra Wideband (UWB): the $270 Aqara U400. The great thing about having UWB is, as Christoffel notes, one’s door can lock and unlock “based on your presence alone.” I’ve been lax in writing about it, but regarding Home Key broadly, it’s been a revelation for me. I’ve been using the $349 Level Lock Pro for a few months, and it’s terrific. I still use physical keys, and the Level Lock even includes an optional key fob, but locking and unlocking my front door is eminently more accessible using my iPhone or Apple Watch. Like with the accessory setup, no longer do I have to battle my lackluster hand-eye coordination in order to get into my house, in this case. All I need to do is place my phone or watch near the deadbolt and it just works. I love it.
As a category writ large, the smart home exemplifies the notion that technology indeed can transcend sheer novelty or coolness or convenience. Apple is not, and has not, explicitly marketing, say, Home Key as a de-facto accessibility feature—but it really and truly is. Especially if you get something like the aforementioned U400 with UWB, all a person has to do is get near their front door and it’ll be unlocked for them. Again, Home Key removes literal barriers to entry and empowers people to control their home in an autonomous, dignified manner. That’s not at all trivial for people with disabilities.
‘Ted Lasso’ Gets Season 4 Release Date, Trailer
Ryan Christoffel reported for 9to5 Mac earlier this week the dearly beloved Ted Lasso has received a premiere date, as well as a trailer, for Season 4. The new season will drop August 5 on Apple TV, with new episodes dropping weekly through October 7.
“We believed, and now it’s finally happening: Ted Lasso returns for season 4 this summer, and Apple TV just announced the release date and debuted its first trailer,” Christoffel wrote on Tuesday. “Ted Lasso last aired new episodes in 2023, and its conclusion came with lots of uncertainty about the show’s future. Although it seemed like everyone in the cast, along with viewers, wanted the show to continue, season 3 appeared for a time like it was the end.”
Season 4 sees Lasso return to Richmond FC to coach a relegated women’s team.
Believe it or not, I’m probably the only person on the planet who hasn’t yet seen Seasons 1–3 in their entirety. I finished the first season, but never got around to finishing the latter two. As part of my ongoing mental health battle, I’ve been watching a lot of television as a form of self-care; I’m revisiting favorites like For All Mankind (also on Apple TV), The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (on Prime Video), and The Pitt (on HBO Max). I should put Ted Lasso on my list in anticipation of the fourth season. I found Season 1 to be funny and, as a sports fan, I like the soccer angle. Under the circumstances, I find shows already I know and love an easier way to turn my brain off than invest in an all-new series with new characters and new storylines to absorb.
Now if only The Gilded Age (also on HBO Max) would get a return date already.
Apple Vision Pro Assists in ‘milestone’ Eye Surgery
Eye care company SightMD put out a press release this week in which it announced New York ophthalmologist Dr. Eric Rosenberg has become the “first surgeon in the world” to successfully perform cataract surgery using Apple Vision Pro. The procedure used ScopeXR, a mixed reality platform touted as “a new way to visualize surgery.”
The initial procedure was performed last October, with SightMD saying in the press release “Dr. Rosenberg and his team have performed hundreds of additional cases using the platform, demonstrating both its scalability and real-world clinical impact.” ScopeXR is described as “a spatial computing software platform designed specifically for ophthalmic surgery,” with the company further noting the software platform “[streaming] real-time surgical imaging directly into the surgeon’s headset.”
“What we accomplished in that operating room is something that has never been done before anywhere in the world,” Dr. Eric Rosenberg said in a statement included with the announcement. “This isn’t just about a new device, it’s about reimagining what the operating room of the future looks like. We’ve created a platform that makes surgeons safer, smarter, and more connected.”
He added: “We are now able to bring the world’s best surgeon into any operating room, at any hour, from anywhere on the planet. From residents performing their first cases to surgeons facing unexpected complications, this technology democratizes access to expertise and that will save vision.”
This story caught my attention because I’ve lived with cataracts most of my life, having surgery for them when I was 17. From a technological perspective, it’s good to see Vision Pro increasingly see “mainstream” adoption, albeit it for esoteric, niche use cases. When you consider something truly life-changing like what Dr. Rosenberg and team have accomplished, it gives productivity on visionOS entirely new meaning—making features like Mac Virtual Display feel comparatively small. For all Apple’s bravado about spatial computing being the future of the industry—and they’re not wrong, per se—the Vision Pro hasn’t been the Trojan horse the company hoped it could be for the mass market. Nonetheless, no one can dispute the Vision Pro is a tour de force of engineering and absolutely is “pulled from the future into the present.” I like mine, the original M2 model, a lot—even if it is used only for watching Apple TV, etc.
Once More unto the breach, touch bar edition
John Gruber posted on Daring Fireball this week a link to his appearance on the most recent Vergecast with hosts Nilay Patel and David Pierce. I typically wouldn’t write about it here, but Gruber’s item contained a draw: the much-maligned Touch Bar.
The Vergecast’s episode description asks, somewhat cheekily, whether the Touch Bar’s troubles are attributable to Tim Cook himself or is it his fault Apple didn’t try hard enough to improve on it. Gruber, in response to the question, says in part “going back to dumb fiddly F-keys with functional icons printed on them was uncharacteristically lazy for Apple.” Apple conceived it, developed it, shipped it, and then… gave up on it.
I was at the October 2016 media event during which the then-redesigned MacBook Pro featured the Touch Bar as its marquee feature. To this day, I vividly remember sitting in the Town Hall audience—incidentally, my one and only Apple event I’ve ever covered from the company’s still-in-use Infinite Loop campus—and being mesmerized by Craig Federighi’s demos of the Touch Bar. I loved how more accessible it was to, to name just one example, use the Touch Bar to easily and quickly elect emoji rather than use Character Viewer on macOS. Likewise, I bought Phil Schiller’s marketing pitch that the Touch Bar’s dynamism was a better (and cooler!) alternative to what Gruber called “dumb, fiddly Function keys.” I can’t recall the last time I used the static F-keys on my Magic Keyboard for anything beyond adjusting volume or screen brightness. Again, the allure of the Touch Bar was I could do those things, and then some, right from the sleek little OLED strip above the keyboard, replete with familiar-looking, iOS-like controls.
(That event opened with an accessibility video featuring my friend Sady Paulson.)
I, along with probably everyone else in that room, rightly believed Apple would iterate on the Touch Bar for years to come—maybe even expand to the MacBook Air or the Magic Keyboard peripheral itself. Obviously, that never came to pass. The Touch Bar withered on the proverbial vine before Apple discontinued it with the 2021 release of the M1 Pro/Max MacBook Pros. What was ushered with a bang exited with but a whimper. My understanding over the years has been the software people inside Apple Park more or less fell out of love with the Touch Bar. I’ve never gotten a concrete explanation why, but the enthusiasm evidently was severely, irreparably curbed.
It’s a shame, because hardware was never the Touch Bar’s Achilles heel. It needed improvement software-wise; as I argued numerous times the Touch Bar would’ve been made eminently better had Apple given it haptic feedback. As it was, one big thing that rankled me about the Touch Bar’s public perception from reviewers and the Apple community was how ostensibly “useless” it was because 99% of people are touch typists. I hate to break it to the able-bodied masses, but not everyone is a touch typist. My low vision, coupled with the partial paralysis in my hands caused by cerebral palsy, make touch typing nigh impossible. Indeed, I’m part of the 0.1% who must look down at the keyboard in order to type in my hunt-and-peck fashion. In fact, I’m looking down at my keyboard even as I write this very sentence! The salient point is I staunchly believe the Touch Bar got railroaded perceptually, never mind Apple’s culpability in its demise. The Touch Bar left the world with so much unrealized potential, and I’m still salty over how Apple nerds characterize it. Touch Bar Zoom is/was a masterpiece.
If macOS 27 drops support for Intel Macs, how much time does the Touch Bar have left?