Background Sounds: an inaccessible "accessibility" feature

Question

Samtoops Author

Level 1

8 points

Background Sounds: an inaccessible "accessibility" feature

"Accessibility Shortcuts" don't include the ability to control background sounds.

Everything else is included
Under hearing, it only shows "live captions" and "live speech"

Why it Matters:

This makes a bad experience for me

* Three layers of settings keep me from the feature

* Turning on/off should be bare minimum

* There should be volume control and sound selection easily accessible

This is bad for the business

* People pay good money for sound machines

* If this was leveraged as a feature, I know of half-a-dozen friends who would use this with their kids in a heartbeat

The bottom line:

I use this feature everyday and it frustrates me every time.
I use this because there are no gaps and it doesn't screw up my algorithm like it would on spotify
This is a feature I already use heavily and want to use more but it's so difficult to reach on my Mac, iPhone and Apple Watch.

A final note:

As an accessibility tool, this issue cause the tool to be self-defeating
- I have ADHD
- Background sounds is meant to help limit distractions
- I get distracted attempting to activate it due to the lack of easy access

Exhibit A:

* I was working on something important

* I went to turn on background sounds

* I'm now 10 minutes into writing this post

MacBook Air 13″

Posted on Sep 6, 2024 8:26 AM

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Answer 1

brbo

Level 8

35,921 points

Sep 6, 2024 2:35 PM in response to Samtoops

Hi Samtoops,

welcome to the Apple (user-to-user) Community.

Re: Background Sounds

Thank you for your carefully thought out and well-presented post to the Community. Commiserations.on your plight. There's a (non-Apple) article online which may. be helpful, although it was written for iPhone a year ago. Seems you use a Mac, which is fine. Hopefully you can figure things out to set this up, or, post us questions.

The article is: "iPhone Background Sounds: How To Use Apple’s Accessibility Feature". The writer explains how to add Background Sounds to Accessibility shortcuts, after you add Accessibility Shortcuts to Control Center.

If you scroll down the article, it says: "How Do I Turn Off Background Sounds on My iPhone?

You can always turn background sounds off by going to Settings > Accessibility > Audio/Visual > Background Sounds. I’m also going to take a look at how you can create shortcuts for background sounds, allowing you to turn them off and on with a simple click of a switch or specific button command. Thanks to Control Center and Accessibility Shortcuts, both of these options allow you to quickly enable and disable background sounds."

If you scroll to: "Using Control Center for Quick Access" the article says, and then illustrates how:

"First, you will want to add Accessibility Shortcuts to your included controls in Control Center.

You will then add background sounds to your Accessibility Shortcuts".

Here's a link to the complete article: https://www.macobserver.com/tips/quick-tip/ios-15-background-sounds/

All the best :-)

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