Apple previewed the upcoming summer release of the next iteration of its iPhone platform today. A small portion of these features have been documented on the web at the iPhone OS 3.0 Preview.How will iPhone OS 3.0 affect iPhone accessibility? To be honest, it is way too soon to say. Apple’s show today highlighted only a few of the new features and accessibility was not on the agenda. However, digging a little deeper, I found a few nuggests.
More Landscape Mode
Landscape mode is a key accessibility feature for the iPhone. A wider screen allows a larger font while maintaining readability. This summer , we will be able to “(r)ead and compose email and text messages in landscape” on the iPhone. This is an important first step. Hopefully app developers will follow where Apple is leading.
Accessories
“Using the new External Accessory framework, your application can now communicate with “Made for iPod” hardware accessories attached to iPhone or iPod touch through either the 30-pin dock connector or wirelessly using Bluetooth.“
This option opens up a market for disability accessories. For example, an external camera combined with the right app could turn the iPhone into a portable magnifier. This could be done with the iPhone interanal camera (not on the Touch though), but an external camera would make zooming in on labels and such much easier.
Pod Library Access
“Access music, podcasts, or audio books in a user’s iPod library directly from your application using the updated Media Player framework. You can play, repeat and shuffle songs or whole playlists, or create sequences of songs using custom searches.“
The iPhone music app does its job, but is not very accessible. Fonts are small and fixed. There is no zoom. Landscape mode triggers a neat, but inaccessible, shlef feature. App library access gives developers the opportunity to build a better music interface. Perhaps even a dedicated audiobook app with placemarkers, not-taking and chapter information.
Voice
I did not see this on the Apple site, but in some of the media reports there is talk of more voice features. I can’t say much about this without details. Voice is the key feature for fully universal accessibility.
In the End
Perhaps Apple has not focused directly on accessibility. Yet, as it opens up more of the iPhone’s functions to developers, Apple is unleashing the creativity of its coding community. Let’s see how interested developers are in making the iPhone accessible.
Read more about iPhone Access here.
If you find this post useful or interesting, please consider buying me a cup of coffee.
If you are interested in joining our mailing list, please submit your email below. 
I’m wondering why nobody has done a magnifier for the iphone (using the internal camera). Note that zoom can be done in software by taking a photo at a higher resolution than can be displayed and displaying only a part of that image.
Part of the problem could be getting focus.
I’m a developer for the blackberry storm currently and I’ve just discovered that RIM doesn’t provide enough API to the camera to produce a magnifier (which I wanted to develop). The hardware on the storm is capable of producing magnification if the API were opened up more.
I’m also kind of surprised that nobody in the apple world has written their own video app. Shouldn’t be that tough….just take photos quickly at the lowest resolution….maybe there is No low res photo capability.??
Hope you get what you want in the next iphone.
You bring up some excellent points here. I should start a regular seires of post with ideas for accessible iPhone apps. Maybe a developer will follow up on a few. Thanks!
I know that 3.0 has an accessability option in the menu iv’e ssen from the screen shots but iv’e been hunting the internet trying to find exactly what options there will be, specificly for visual impairments, but not speech or anything that requires speech as being Deaf and visually imapred any speech options would be useless..
im talking about big fonts on everything, the abilty to zoom on everything, grey scale contrasting, ect…
do you know what these options will be?
Im surprised Mac didnt put an accessability option in to the original OS, they have a good history with access especially for the Deaf visually impaired.
Thanks