By Shelly Brisbin

March 30, 2023 5:14 PM PT

Video: Using VoiceOver with the Weather app

Hey there, I’m Shelly Brisbin and I’m here to demo a new feature in iOS 16.4. Specifically, it’s in the Weather app, and even more specifically than that, it is for people who use the VoiceOver screen reader that’s part of iOS.

VoiceOver is a tool used by blind and visually impaired folks to hear the contents of the screen rather than viewing them. So using a combination of speech and touch, you can find out what’s under your fingers. That’s pretty easy if the content is text or even something that can be described pretty easily like a button, something that you can label. But if you have something like an overlay from inside the Weather app, it’s a little harder to use VoiceOver to describe it because it’s visual and it’s color coded. So what I’m going to show you is what I call “sonic overlay.” It’s an overlay that uses pitch to indicate the level of rain that an area is having right now.

[Shelly Brisbin is a radio producer, host of the Parallel podcast, and author of the book iOS Access for All. She's the host of Lions, Towers & Shields, a podcast about classic movies, on The Incomparable network.]

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