The telephone has come a long way since inventor Alexander Graham Bell made the first call nearly a century-and-a-half ago. Now, it’s no longer a communication device glued to our ear but a multipurpose tool for navigating the world. For people with hearing loss or impairment, the iPhone 17’s accessibility features make life run smoothly without sound.
Turn Sound into Text
With the Sound Recognition feature, your iPhone can identify specific sounds within your environment — even a cat’s meow — and notify you of them via text. You can add sounds by placing your phone nearby when they occur, recording them and categorizing them as sounds you want your device to recognize.
The Live Captions feature also works in real time, whether transcribing dialogue from a movie or face-to-face conversations in your everyday life. Tap the Appearance option to customize the text, size and color of the captions. Standard subtitles and captions are also available in addition to special accessible captions through the Apple TV app.
Transcripts of audio messages are an option as well.
Pair Hearing Devices with iOS
You can use Made-for-iPhone (MFi) hearing aids or sound processors and adjust their settings, automatically routing audio calls to your hearing device, amplifying conversations in noisy environments through Live Listen, etc.
With AirPods, you can turn on Follow iPhone to adjust audio based on your head movement (for supported audio and video content).
You can use an audiogram to customize the audio settings on supported Apple and Beats headphones in order to improve their sound quality. Easy to create in the Health app, audiograms display the volume level sounds need to be for you to hear them, which they determine through pure-tone audio tests.
Alternatives to Noise Alerts
For users who can’t hear the sounds of incoming calls and other alerts, the iPhone 17 can flash its LED, which is next to the camera lens on the back of your iPhone.
You can also have the always helpful virtual assistant, Siri, announce notifications and calls from apps like Messages on your iPhone speaker, supported headphones, when using CarPlay, and on MFi hearing devices.
The next iOS 17-related blog will focus on accessibility features for people with cognitive disabilities. Stay tuned!