- tvOS 27 for Apple TV 4K isn’t announced yet, but Apple has revealed some features
- They’re focused on accessibility, including changing text size and auto-generating subtitles for videos that don’t have them
- Apps that don’t use Apple’s tech frameworks may not be able to support them, though
We’ve been banging the drum for improving accessibility on Apple TV for ages, and it looks like tvOS 27 is going to deliver some really useful features later this year.
Even though tvOS 27 hasn’t officially been unveiled yet, and won’t be until WWDC 2026 on June 8th most likely, Apple has already revealed several new accessibility changes coming to the system. They’re things that lots of people may actually want to use, not just those with vision or hearing difficulty.
However, apps that don’t use Apple’s developer frameworks and prefer their own proprietary tech, such as Netflix’s app or the Prime Video app, may not support them.
One of the new features enables you to set the size of text on your TV, which is very handy for people with low or deteriorating vision: it’ll adjust the descriptions on the Home Screen, in menus and in apps so that they’re easier to read.
It’ll work in any apps that support Apple’s Dynamic Type feature, so if you can do it on your iPhone apps (where this feature already exists) you should be able to do it on your Apple TV 4K.
Smarter subtitling is coming to Apple TV
One of the most interesting new features is live transcription of videos that don’t have subtitles already, such as older movie files or your own home videos. And in the latter case you’ll be glad to know that all the processing is happening locally: your videos aren’t being uploaded anywhere new to make it happen, it’s just using the chip built into the device.
Although we’re focusing on Apple TV here, this feature will also come to the iPhone, iPad, Mac and Vision Pro — the latter seems especially interesting, if the tech inside every turns out to be the basis for some Apple smart glasses.
That’s the good news. The bad is that initially the subtitling feature will be limited to English, although more language support will be added later.
Last but not least, any hearing aids with Made for iPhone certification will get more reliable AirPods-style seamless transition between Apple devices across iOS, iPadOS, macOS and visionOS.
That means that if you want the sound from your Apple TV 4K beamed directly into your hearing aid, you could do it with just a couple of clicks, and no fiddly pairing process.
The new features are part of a wider package of accessibility improvements that’ll be 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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