iPhone 3GS Accessibility Features

[A response to Cole Camplese in which he asks about iPhone and Accessibility.]

I recently attended the Illinois Accessibility Conference to conferences to present on open source projects and their superior model of implementing and improving accessibility to software releases. There was a lot of excitement about the accessibility of Apple's latest iPhone product release - iPhone 3GS.
In summary, the new iPhone 3GS is an important advance in interaction design and accessibility. Blogs and lists are also enthusiastic (some wildly so) about the effectiveness of VoiceOver technology integrated with the operating system and applications. There are some naysayers, to be sure. But, in balance, Apple has scored a huge hit with the community of blind Web users.

VoiceOver will influence iPhone development and adoption by the community of disabled users with the concurrent release of the software development kit (SDK). The Blind Wiki notes the increasing number of applications that have been upgraded to support VoiceOver, but to claim broad support will undoubtedly take more time.

But the real story is the rapid adoption of iPhone 3GS by blind users. At a recent conference I wanted to surprise Victor Tsaras (twitter @vick08), Senior Accessibility Program Manager at Yahoo! with (I laugh, now) demonstration of the VoiceOver interface. But, before I could finish my sentence, he pulled his iPhone out and gave an impressive demo of his own style of interaction.

There are currently 94 members in the accessible iphone Yahoo! group, and 316 members in the visually impaired iphone Yahoo! group.

There are some useful and interesting lessons for Web designers from the iPhone story. The most compelling is the effect great design can have on delivering expanded affordances to users. It's completely counter-intuitive that there could be an effective touch-screen device that is also accessible, but Apple introduced it and it was received with positive reviews by the blind / VI community. It was forward-looking universal design - a truly great creative leap - that bridged the touch and speech interfaces.