Apple’s Accessibility Legacy Profiled On the latest ‘Twenty Thousand Hertz’ Podcast
Here’s a tidbit of (admittedly esoteric) tech trivia: Apple has worked on accessibility for 40 years. In fact, the voice the original Macintosh used to introduce itself in 1984 was powered by the Mac’s very first text-to-speech engine, cheekily known as MacinTalk.
An accessibility feature ushered one of the most seminal devices in computing history.
I was not even 3 years old when the Macintosh debuted. I was 4 when Apple’s accessibility department was born in 1985. How do I know these events if I were too young to remember them? It isn’t thanks to Wikipedia—it’s the Twenty Thousand Hertz podcast! The show, hosted by Dallas Taylor and described as “a lovingly crafted podcast about the sonic world for all ages [that’s an] upbeat, inclusive celebration of sound, covering everything from pop culture, to science, to history and beyond.” The latest episode is all about Apple and accessibility, particularly the innovations the company has created around audio and sound. A newsworthy mention on the podcast is the hearing aid feature in AirPods Pro that, alongside Apple Intelligence, was delivered to customers with last October’s much-ballyhooed release of iOS 18.1. Taylor’s narration is interspersed with interviews with Apple’s Sarah Herrlinger, Deidre Caldbeck, Ron Huang, and Eric Treski. CEO Tim Cook can also be heard in the episode.
I interviewed Herrlinger, Apple’s senior director of global accessibility policy and initiatives, back in December. She talked to me all about the aforementioned AirPods hearing health features, fittingly noting Apple has worked on hearing-oriented accessibility software “for decades.” She added accessibility, be it hearing or something else, is deeply ingrained in “everything we do” at the company because disability is part and parcel of the human experience. To that end, she said, the company wants its products to be accessible usable by everyone. This ethos goes a long way in explaining why Apple’s accessibility features are renowned in the industry for their unparalleled breadth and depth. It’s this purposeful acknowledgment of, and commitment to, such a diverse set of needs that make Apple Secretariat at the Belmont in the eyes of many in the disability community, as well as other accessibility aesthetes.
Beyond Apple, it’s worth noting the episode begins with a cursory look at how accessibility features have influenced history. Audiobooks, for example, are mainstream nowadays and immensely popular. Yet audiobooks were originally conceived to meet the needs of Blind people who couldn’t read the printed word. The anecdote reminds of my interview last year with disability activist Dr. Victor Pineda. He told me in part disabled people are technologists and accessibility is an incubator for innovation. His website makes that notion even more abundantly clear, saying in a really big font “inclusion is not just a buzzword; it is the very essence of innovation.”
The Twenty Thousand Hertz episode with Herrlinger can be found on Apple Podcasts.
