Apple cares about accessibility. They’ve shown this over the years and they’re doing it again.
Ahead of Global Accessibility Awareness Day on May 19, Apple made several updates to its stores, highlighting accessibility. The App Store has been updated featuring developers and apps in a number of categories including Vision, Hearing, Speech, Learning & Literacy, Physical Motor and Accessible Home With Siri.
Apple also made a new iTunes room with hundreds of audio described movies for people who are blind or have low vision. Titles include Star Wars: The Force Awakens, The Martian, The Big Short, The Revenant, Spectre, and The Peanuts Movie, among others.
The Apple Store now features third-party accessories that focus on accessibility. These products include Skoog 2, a unique accessible musical instrument, Humanware Braille Displays (for blind users), and a variety of Ablenet switches (for those with limited mobility).
I agree, Apple has embraced alternative access to their technology from the very early days. I was involved as a consultant on the team that built Easy Access and while it was far from “integrated” it offered the first accessibility points for the early Mac. After that Apple lost its way for a while and regained it when Jobs came back with the NeXT team and OS X.
What Jobs did that I didn’t like at the time but turned out to be exactly the right move, was to disband Apple’s Worldwide Accessibility Group (which I was part of) and integrate much of what that group did into the System Software group. This, in the long run, made for better integration and less of a possibility that accessibility would be an add-on and/or, an afterthought.
Cook and team are taking it further and this is terrific.
Not sure what you mean by an “iTunes room.” The link you provide takes you to the iTunes download page. Apple provides instructions for finding described content at https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205742. Is that what you mean?