- tvOS 27 for Apple TV 4K hasn’t been announced yet, but Apple has revealed some features
- They focus on accessibility, including changing text size and automatically generating subtitles for videos that don’t have them.
- However, apps that don’t use Apple’s technology frameworks may not be compatible with them.
We’ve been working hard to improve accessibility on Apple TV for years, and it looks like tvOS 27 will offer some really useful features later this year.
Although tvOS 27 hasn’t been officially unveiled yet, and likely won’t be until WWDC 2026 on June 8, Apple has already revealed several new accessibility changes coming to the system. These are things that many people may want to use, not just those with visual or hearing difficulties.
However, apps that don’t use Apple’s development frameworks and prefer their own proprietary technology, such as the Netflix app or the Prime Video app, may not support them.
One of the new features allows you to set the size of the text on your TV, which is very useful for people with low or impaired vision: it will adjust the descriptions on the home screen, in menus and in apps to make them easier to read.
It will work in any app that supports Apple’s dynamic type feature, so if you can do it in apps on your iPhone (where this feature already exists), you should be able to do it on your Apple TV 4K.
Smarter subtitles come to Apple TV
One of the coolest new features is live transcription of videos that don’t yet have subtitles, like older movie files or your own home videos. And in the latter case, you’ll be happy to know that all processing is done locally – your videos aren’t uploaded anywhere new for this to happen, just the device’s built-in chip is used.
Although we focus on Apple TV here, this feature will also come to the iPhone, iPad, Mac and Vision Pro; The latter seems especially interesting, if the technology inside each turns out to be the basis of some Apple smart glasses.
That’s the good news. The downside is that initially the subtitle feature will be limited to English, although more language support will be added later.
Last but not least, any Made for iPhone-certified headphones will get a more reliable and seamless AirPods-style transition between Apple devices on iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and visionOS.
That means if you want the sound from your Apple TV 4K to stream directly to your hearing aid, you can do so with just a couple of clicks and without any complicated pairing process.
The new features are part of a broader package of accessibility improvements coming to the next generation of Apple operating systems later this year, and we’ll no doubt see at least some of them demonstrated at WWDC 26 next month.
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