Discover accessibility features for Apple Education

At Apple, we believe that technology is most powerful when it empowers everyone. With built-in speech, vision, mobility, hearing, and cognitive features, Apple devices provide students, teachers, and leaders with personalization they need to learn, create, thrive, and define their own success.

For more than four decades, Apple has worked alongside schools, districts, colleges, and universities to understand the role of accessible technology in learning. In 1978, Apple first introduced personal computers to the classroom and opened its first Office of Special Education — later renamed the Worldwide Disability Solutions Group in 1985. And in 1987, Apple partnered with the National Special Education Alliance to form the Alliance for Technology Access to "create assistive technology solutions nationwide."

Today, Apple continues to iterate year-over-year with accessibility and education in mind, creating a wealth of accessibility features to support a wide range of learning needs.

Learn more about Apple's commitment to accessibility

Engage all learners with Apple

With powerful, built-in assistive features, Apple devices support the diverse needs of every learner — helping them create, communicate, personalize, and explore in new ways. With adjustable, visual settings, customized learning tools, and alternative communication methods, students can engage with content in ways that resonate with their unique learning styles.

Early learners

Apple devices help bring intentional, natural, and age-appropriate learning to life for early learners. Features like Spoken Content with Speak Screen and Speak Selection, which reads text aloud and can support emerging readers. To keep students focused, Guided Access can help students stay on track by using one app.

Multilingual learners

To support multilingual learners, Apple devices provide the necessary features to customize language as needed. For example, students can use Spoken Content with eight distinct voices, and more than sixty languages and locales, to hear their writing out loud. And Safari Reader is an assistive technology feature shows a webpage article in one page, formatted for easy reading and presented without navigation or other distractions. Students can adjust their font, font size, and background color to fully customize their viewing experience.

Accessibility features for your learning community

Apple devices are inclusive by design, with built-in accessibility features to help you connect, create, and do what you love — in the ways that work best for you.

Vision

If you're blind, have low vision, or just prefer larger text, these features help you customize your display, control your devices, or navigate your surroundings.

VoiceOver

VoiceOver describes what’s on your screen — audibly, in braille, or both. Auditory descriptions of elements help you easily navigate your screen through simple gestures on a touchscreen or trackpad or a Bluetooth keyboard. You can use a refreshable braille display connected via Bluetooth to your Apple device or enter braille directly on the touchscreen using Braille Screen Input. Braille is automatically converted to text in a caption panel on Mac so sighted people can follow along with VoiceOver descriptions.

With Live Recognition, you get descriptions of objects in the real world, such as people, doors, text, and furniture in indoor spaces.¹ It also offers deep customization options for your needs, like modifying your favorite built-in voice for speech feedback and tailoring its verbosity, speed, and accompanying sound and haptic feedback to your own preferences.²

Magnifier

A digital magnifying glass that zooms in on, detects, and describes objects around you. Magnifier uses the camera on your iPhone or iPad to increase the size of any physical object you point it at, like words in a text book or a whiteboard at the front of a room, so you can see all the details clearly on your screen. Use the flash to light the object, adjust filters to help you differentiate colors, or freeze a specific frame to get a static close-up.

For those who are blind or have low vision and want more information about their physical surroundings, Detection Mode in Magnifier offers intelligent tools like: Door Detection, which can help you navigate to your destination by identifying doors, text, and the presence of symbols — such as a restroom sign; Furniture Detection, which tells you when chairs are present, how far they are away, and if they are occupied; Scenes, which provides a live description of the people, objects, and landscapes in your camera's field of view; Text Detection, which recognizes live text around you; Reader Mode, which takes a text image makes it customizable through the font, font size, or background color; and Point and Speak, which identifies text on nearby physical objects you point to, such as labels on classroom drawers.³

Display Settings & Text Size

Customize colors, text size, transparency, contrast, and more. Even your pointer can be personalized — increase its size in macOS so it's easier to find and use, or customize the color of your pointer to make it easier to spot onscreen. Text Size helps make text more legible and visible with simple font adjustments. With Larger Text, you can adjust the size using an accessibility slider, while Bold Text gives weight to the words on your screen.

Apple Books

Apple Books is a built-in app that lets you find, buy, listen to, and read audiobooks and ebooks all in one place. You can browse curated collections, top audiobooks, and top ebooks and even get personalized recommendations. In the Apple Education Community, you can connect with other educators about how to use Apple products for teaching and learning. Start a discussion, share a story, or share a resource about Books. The Apple Books app provides themes and options for customization, including the ability to bold text and adjust line, character, and word spacing.

Learn more about Apple vision features

Hearing

Explore tools designed to enhance the sounds you hear or help you stay connected without hearing a sound.

Live Captions

Get real-time captions of live conversations and audio from apps. You can follow along with auditory and visual media including Phone and FaceTime calls, as well as content from the web, securely on your device.⁴ And you can customize the Live Captions window so that the size, placement, fonts, and colors suit your needs.⁵

Hearing Health

AirPods Pro 2 now support an easy-to-use, clinical-grade Hearing Aid feature for adults 18 years or older with perceived mild to moderate hearing loss. The Hearing Aid feature makes adjustments that improve the clarity of voices and sounds around you. And you can even customize settings — like amplification, balance, and tone — to your needs.⁶ When paired with an iPhone or iPad, AirPods Pro 2 offer a scientifically validated Hearing Test. You can test your hearing in about five minutes and receive easy-to-understand results and insights about your hearing. AirPods Pro 2 also provide active Hearing Protection across Noise Control modes to help prevent exposure to loud environmental noise.⁷

Live Listen

Live Listen⁸ is an assistive listening feature that helps you have conversations in loud places, such as a school cafeteria or at the front of a classroom near a teacher. Just turn on the feature and move your device toward the people you’re talking with. Audio is picked up by the device’s microphone and sent to your wireless headphones or Made for iPhone hearing devices, so you can hear what they’re saying more clearly.

Made for iPhone hearing devices

Apple has worked with top manufacturers to create hearing aids, cochlear implants, and sound processors designed specifically for Apple devices.⁹ These advanced hearing devices provide outstanding sound quality, offer many helpful features, and are as easy to set up and use as any other Bluetooth device.

Learn more about Apple hearing features

Speech

If you have a speech disability or prefer to connect without using your voice, these innovations give you more ways to communicate, your way.

Live Speech

Live Speech takes your typed words and speaks them out loud. If you are unable to speak, have a speech disability, or prefer to communicate through text, you can use Live Speech to stay connected during Phone and FaceTime calls as well as in-person conversations. You can also save commonly used phrases to help you easily respond during daily interactions and conversations. For example, you can create a Classroom category to group phrases you frequently use as a student or teacher, like "Can you please repeat the question?" or "Is there anything you need help with?"

Personal Voice

Create a voice that sounds like you with Personal Voice.¹⁰ Personal Voice guides you through a series of randomized text prompts or short, three-word phrases to record 15 minutes of audio that can be used to generate a voice that sounds like you.¹¹ You can also sync Personal Voice with end-to-end encryption on iCloud to use your voice on other Apple devices. It integrates seamlessly with Live Speech, so you can type what you want to say and have your iPhone, iPad, Mac, or Apple Watch speak it aloud in your Personal Voice.

Spoken Content

Spoken Content reads any text on your screen aloud, including letters and words as you type.¹² Use Speak Screen if you want to hear the content of your entire screen. Or try Speak Selection if you want to select and hear a specific range of text. During speech playback, you can control the pace of the reading more precisely with Speech Controller. And Typing Feedback speaks every letter you type.

Learn more about Apple speech features

Mobility

Discover features that make it easy to modify your touch, create custom gestures, or control your devices in the ways that work best for you.

AssistiveTouch

Customize how you interact with your touchscreen. AssistiveTouch for iOS and iPadOS enables you to adapt your touchscreen to fit your physical needs. If certain gestures, like pinch or two-finger tap, don't work for you, swap them with a gesture that does or create a touch that's all your own. You can customize the layout of the AssistiveTouch menu too, or connect a Bluetooth device to control an onscreen pointer for navigation. And now with Virtual Trackpad on iPad, you can control your device using a small region of the screen as a resizable trackpad.

Voice Control

Navigate your device using voice commands.¹³ Commands like click, swipe, and tap help you easily interact with your favorite apps. You can precisely select, drag, and zoom by showing numbers alongside clickable items or by superimposing a grid on the screen. Voice Control also offers a more efficient way to write and edit. With Voice Control spelling mode, you can dictate names, addresses, and even custom spellings letter by letter.¹⁵ It's a seamless way to make corrections, format changes, and transition between text dictation and commands. And if you are new to Voice Control on iPhone, iPad, or Mac, the feature includes an onboarding experience with education support to help you learn the ins and outs quickly and easily.

Eye Tracking

Control your device with just your eyes. Eye Tracking uses the front-facing camera, works with iOS and iPadOS apps, and doesn't require additional hardware or accessories.¹⁴ You can use Dwell Control to interact with controls by keeping your eyes on them for a selected amount of time. And you can access additional functions such as physical buttons, swipes, and other gestures solely with your eyes. iPad also supports third-party eye trackers.

Switch Control

Use adaptive switch hardware, game controllers, or sounds like a click, a pop, or an "ee" sound to control devices. Create your own custom panels and keyboards, systemwide or app by app on iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple TV. Platform Switching helps you use a single device to navigate any other devices you have synced with your Apple Account.¹⁶ That way, you can control your Mac directly from your iPhone or iPad without having to set up your switches on each new device.

Learn more about Apple mobility features

Cognitive

If you need support to stay focused or to streamline tasks, these tools can help make your day-to-day easier.

Apple Intelligence

Apple Intelligence supports effective written communication and improves reading comprehension, memory and recollection, and more.¹⁷ Writing Tools allow students to proofread their text, rewrite different versions until the tone and wording are just right, and summarize text with a tap. In the Notes app, you can capture audio recordings and transcripts and then get a summary of your transcripts for easy reference later. Writing Tools are available nearly everywhere you write, including third-party apps.

And with its deep understanding of language, Apple Intelligence can help condense the information most important to you. Notifications are summarized so you can scan them for key details, such as when a group chat is particularly active. And the Reduce Interruptions Focus shows you only the notifications that might need immediate attention, like a text about an early pickup from daycare.

Background Sounds

Background Sounds help minimize distractions and increase your sense of focus, calm, and restfulness to the tune of distant rain or ocean waves. Choose from balanced, bright, and dark noise and ocean, rain, and stream sounds to continuously play in the background and mask excess environmental or external noise. These sounds can also mix into or duck under other audio and system sounds that are playing through your device.

Assistive Access

Tailor your device and in-app experiences to lighten your cognitive load. Assistive Access makes it easy for students with cognitive disabilities to tailor iPhone and iPad to lighten cognitive load and suit their specific needs and preferences. Assistive Access offers a distinctive interface with high-contrast buttons, large text labels, and visual alternatives to text, including customized experiences for Phone and FaceTime (which have been combined into a single Calls app), Messages, Camera, Photos, and Music.

Learn more about Apple cognitive features

Additional resources for your learning community

Apple offers a wide variety of educational content, customer support options, communities, instructional programs, and other resources for students and teachers alike.

Accessibility Support Videos

From using your iPhone without seeing the screen, to adapting gestures to your physical needs, discover how the accessibility features built into your Apple devices can help you do more.

Learn tips and how-tos from Apple on YouTube

Assistive Technologies

These Apple-approved, third-party assistive technologies can help you get even more from your technology — in the ways that work best for you.

Explore third-party devices for vision, hearing, and mobility

Accessibility Support Page

Find information about Apple's built-in accessibility tools and technologies that help people with disabilities get the most from their Apple products. Download user guides in braille, learn about our built-in features with video tutorials, download VPATs, explore contact options and more.

Learn more about accessibility features

accessibility@apple.com

For over 20 years, Apple has provided a dedicated email address for individuals with disabilities to provide feedback, ask questions, and report issues with software. Emails from around the world are reviewed by a team of experts.

Email Accessibility Feedback Team

Phone Support

Apple also has dedicated phone support for individuals with disabilities available in English at the following numbers:

• United States: 1-877-204-3930

• United Kingdom: 0800 048 0754

• Australia: (61) 1-300-365-083

• China mainland: 400-619-8141 (Mandarin only)

SignTime

Apple provides on-demand sign language interpreting services to enable immediate and effective communications in the following countries: UK, US, Canada, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Korea, Australia, Japan.

How to contact Apple using SignTime

Education Community

Engage with other educators using Apple products for teaching and learning.

Explore Accessibility related posts and share resources

Learn to Code

Apple's Everyone Can Code Curriculum was designed with Accessibility in mind. Explore Apple's resources, including Tactile Puzzle Worlds for Swift Playgrounds and Coding Concepts in American Sign Language.

Get Hands-On coding and app design resources

Learn more about coding concepts in American Sign Language

Today at Apple Group Sessions

Today at Apple Group Sessions is an opportunity for teachers and students to learn about topics at the Apple Store, including accessibility topics.

Discover Today at Apple Group Sessions near you

Apple Camp

Apple Camp is a summer program at the Apple Store that teaches kids ages 8–12 how to do fun stuff.

Learn more about Apple Camp

Apple Professional Learning

Online or in person, Apple Professional Learning provides meaningful resources for your entire school. It's an ongoing collaboration between Apple and educators worldwide.

Explore Apple Professional Learning

Developer Accessibility

With built-in accessibility features, accessibility APIs, and developer tools, Apple operating systems provide extraordinary opportunities to deliver high-quality experiences to everyone, including people with disabilities.

Learn more about accessibility tools and resources for developers

Hadley

Explore instructional tutorials on using vision accessibility features for iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, and Apple Watch.

Watch Hadley accessibility tutorials

Teach Access

Teach Access provides free programs and resources to help students and educators learn the fundamentals of disability and accessibility.

Get access to free programs and resources from Teach Access

VPATs

Access Apple's Voluntary Product Accessibility Templates (VPATs) and learn how Apple products comply with U.S. Section 508 accessibility standards.

Learn about Apple's Voluntary Product Accessibility Templates (VPATs)