Apple Intelligence bolsters accessibility features, aiding people with disabilities

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Apple Intelligence bolsters accessibility features, aiding people with disabilities

21 May 2026

Apple today previewed a suite of accessibility updates that use Apple Intelligence to bring new capabilities to features users rely on every day, including VoiceOver, Magnifier, Voice Control, and Accessibility Reader. Apple also announced on-device generated subtitles for uncaptioned video content coming to the Apple ecosystem, as well as a new feature for Apple Vision Pro users to control compatible wheelchairs with their eyes.

The promised enhanced accessibility features, to be rolled out across a number of Apple devices, seem like they could make a positive difference for people with disabilities.

Apple Intelligence is the name Apple gives to the suite of AI technologies they are developing.

It might be argued there are not a great many favourable applications of AI technology, but these initiatives could well be an exception.

Falling birth rates and smartphones: a technology as malevolent as AI?

19 May 2026

Om Gupta, writing for India Today:

The researchers believe smartphones fundamentally changed how young people interact with each other. More time shifted online, while face-to-face socialising declined. According to the study, this reduction in in-person interaction may have contributed to lower fertility rates. The pattern appears to extend beyond just the US and UK. Financial Times analysis found that birth rates in several countries began falling sharply around the same time smartphones became widely adopted.

Gupta cites research published a few days ago by the Financial Times (paywalled).

I doubt the blame for the reported decline in birth rates globally can be placed wholly at the feet of smartphones, but it’s not unreasonable to believe they are playing some role.

It’s hardly empirical proof, but increasingly I need to sidestep people walking along the footpath who are focused only on their smartphone, almost oblivious to the presence of anyone else. If people can’t go without phones during a short walk from one place to another, when are they ever supposed to focus on other things, let alone meeting, and interacting with others, face-to-face?

I’m a smartphone user the same as everyone else, and couldn’t begin to imagine managing without one. But if indeed it is the case that smartphones are contributing — at least partly — to falling birth rates, shouldn’t we be alarmed?

In recent weeks we have been witnessing a growing, at times hostile, backlash against AI technologies. People are angry and fearful. They are concerned by the threat AI poses to their livelihoods. Of the three epoch-defining shifts in technology — to use the words of John Gruber — in recent decades, being the web, smartphones, and AI, it is the last, AI, that is seen as malevolent.

Or the more malevolent.

But if birth rates are falling across the world, and smartphone usage has something to do with that, can we continue to regard these devices as anything less than pernicious?

But pointing the finger of blame at smartphones is the easy part. What to do about the problem, if that’s even how the situation can be described, is far from straightforward.

It somewhat feels like we are painting ourselves into a corner, if we haven’t already, with, really all three of these epoch-defining shifts in technology.

CSS is hard because it solves hard problems

18 May 2026

Julie Evans recently re-wrote her website’s Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and took the fight to the stylesheet language as it were:

So I decided years ago that I wanted to react to “CSS is hard” by getting better at CSS and taking it seriously as a technology, instead of devaluing it. Doing that changed everything for me: I learned that so many of my frustrations (“centering is impossible”) had been addressed in CSS a long time ago, and that also what “centering” means is not always straightforward and it makes sense that there are many ways to do it. CSS is hard because it’s solving a hard problem!

Oh, the fun, and untold lost hours, trying to centre something, without breaking the page layout.

But I would like to delve more deeply into CSS, because the language has become many hundreds of times more vast than when I starting working with it in the late 1990’s.

The last time I came close to doing any heavy lifting was four years ago, when I completely rewrote the HTML and CSS here. As ever though, I was working to do the job as quickly as possible, so I could get back to writing content here, day job, everything else there is to do, etc.

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design, technology, web history

Social news aggregator digg returns as AI and social media news aggregator

15 May 2026

Tangentially related to the previous post… because what we need right now is another news aggregator dedicated to AI.

Otherwise the re-launched social news website (quite unlike Reddit), which went offline some two months after returning earlier this year, is, for better or worse, back.

digg, however, is on the money when it comes to the present state of the web:

There’s a new digg taking shape at di.gg. The bet is simple: the internet has more noise than ever, and the people who can sort signal from it have never been more valuable. Digg’s job is to find that signal and bring it to you. We’re starting with AI. It’s the noisiest, fastest-moving space on the internet right now.

In time though, digg will begin covering other topics. Let’s hope politics is one the first…

Only films with human actors, writers, will be eligible for Oscar nomination

15 May 2026

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS), the organisation that presents the Oscar awards, recently clarified their rules regarding the use of AI in films they will accept nominations for.

According to rule two, regarding eligibility, specifically clause seven, there are instance where AI, and “other digital tools” (things like visual effects, computer-generated imagery, and green screen, I expect) can be used by filmmakers (PDF), to a degree :

With regard to Generative Artificial Intelligence and other digital tools used in the making of the film, the tools neither help nor harm the chances of achieving a nomination. The Academy and each branch will judge the achievement, taking into account the degree to which a human was at the heart of the creative authorship when choosing which movie to award. If questions arise regarding the aforementioned use of Generative Artificial Intelligence, the Academy reserves the right to request more information about the nature of the use and human authorship.

Rule six, clause one, in regards to the acting awards, makes clear that only films with human actors can be nominated:

Only roles credited in the film’s legal billing and demonstrably performed by humans with their consent will be considered eligible.

Rule twenty-four, clause two, spells out eligibility for writing (screenplays, etc) Oscars:

To be eligible in either Writing category, an explicit screenwriting credit must be present in the film’s legal billing and the screenplay must be human-authored.

That covers the Oscars, for now, but raises the question: will there eventually be a separate set of “night of night” awards — that are nothing to do with the AMPAS/Oscars — for films that are wholly, or largely, made using AI technologies. My guess is it’s bound to happen sooner or later.

AI agents might be able to identity anonymous online writers

12 May 2026

American journalist Kelsey Piper, writing at The Argument:

But soon, the entire debate over internet anonymity will be as anachronistic as an iPod Touch. That’s because Claude Opus 4.7 is here, and last week, I discovered it could identify me from text I had never published, text from when I was in high school, text from genres I have never publicly written in. And if it can identify me, soon, it will be able to identify many of you.

There’s quite a cohort of people — including bloggers — writing anonymously online. Possibly though, those most at risk of being identified might be people who have a reasonable amount of publicly accessible work that is in their actual name. For instance, someone who writes for a news outlet or magazine in their own name, but blogs anonymously.

Mind you, the rate at which AI technologies are developing means agents will likely only get better at determining a writer’s identity, working with hardly any information.

AI agents are programmed to seem conscious to make our interactions with them easier, yes?

12 May 2026

British zoologist and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins is certain AI agents are conscious, a conclusion he reached after spending time talking to Anthropic’s agent Claude.

So convinced was he of a connection, or sense of companionship, between them, Dawkins took to calling the bot Claudia. Dawkins is not alone in some regards though; stories of people forming “relationships” of some sort with AI agents are increasingly common.

Does the feeling of a connection between an agent and a person, therefore make the bot conscious? It’s an intriguing question. Because as agents continue to evolve, to become ever more human-like, there are only going to be more people who think they’re interacting with a conscious entity.

Dawkins has been roundly chastised for his thoughts, but perhaps there’s something else in this story that we should be paying more attention to.

Converting old London Underground train door buttons into light switches

7 May 2026

Specifically, a Hue light switch, using an old door opening button from a Jubilee line train.

I lived in London for a few years awhile back, and the District line also had door buttons you’d press to open or close the train doors. As I recall it, the doors on all other lines were controlled by the guard. These passenger operated door buttons could be something of a double-edge sword though.

I was travelling to Richmond one afternoon, and a passenger — possibly still on the way from home from the night before — and wanting to alight at a station, was getting the action all wrong in constantly pressing the door button.

He was — unawares, I was pretty sure — cancelling out the efforts of someone on the platform trying to open the door to board the train. There was confusion on one side of the door, frustration on the other, as the door went through a cycle of partly opening, then partly closing.

Maybe these door open and close actions are better controlled centrally, and the door buttons should be used as light switches instead.

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design, London, technology, travel

Copyright is meaningless in the face of an AI ‘arms race’

7 May 2026

American author Scott Turow, in conjunction with five publishing houses, claims Meta used material protected by copyright to train its AI agent, Llama.

They make the suggestion the Facebook owner chose not to obtain permission to access the copied texts as they wanted to get ahead of the competition in what’s being called “AI arms race.”

Meta, however, sees their use of the copyrighted material as fair use, and claims courts have ruled this to be the case in the past. What will the court determine this time?

If there is indeed an AI “arms race” in progress, which is undoubtedly the case, I can’t see any developer of AI technologies doing anything that will compromise their industry standing. Even if that means doing the right thing by copyright holders.

Born again social network Friendster aims to resurrect real-life friends networks

29 April 2026

Even after Friendster stopped being a social network I still checked in on the website from time to time. It’s evidently been a while since I did that though.

Last time I looked, Friendster — having gone through a number of changes in direction — was a gaming platform, but, as I’ve learned, ceased operations in 2015.

After almost a decade in the wilderness, American developer and entrepreneur Mike Carson has revived the old virtual community, but things are little bit different this time around.

When I signed up (again) I needed to install the Friendster app on my phone, even though there is a website. The biggest difference, that I can see so far, is in the way you connect with other people.

Instead of searching for people you might know, friending people on the new Friendster requires doing so in person. In order to connect, you and your prospective friend need to scan codes on each other’s phones. I’m no Snapchat power user, but I think they do, or did, something similar.

Friending acquaintances face-to-face means friends networks may be somewhat smaller than some social network users are accustomed to, but as copy on the website tells us, Friendster is “built for real-life friends”. That’s a feature that will certainly appeal to some people.

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