Apple’s HomePod smart speakers can control one’s smart home setup.
In a surprise, Apple on Monday announced the HomePod mini now comes in a so-called “Midnight” color. The diminutive smart speaker, which debuted back in October 2020, will be available for order on Wednesday, July 17 and joins the other “bold colors” in blue, orange, white, and yellow. The Midnight color replaces the space gray variant.
As someone who’s written a lot about the smart home lately for this column, I feel a compulsion to maintain the momentum by covering an ostensibly uneventful piece of news for my beat—company sells existing device in new color—because today’s announcement is an apt reminder smart home speakers can be eminently accessible to me and others in the disability community. Apple alludes to this in its press release, saying in part HomePod “offers convenient ways to manage everyday tasks and control the smart home.” Notably, the company also notes this management of one’s smart home can be done in a hands-free manner.
The hands-free operation matters a lot for accessibility. To wit, someone who lacks the requisite fine-motor skills to, for instance, flick a conventional light switch on and off can use their voice to ask Siri to do it for them. Likewise, someone who wants to listen to something in Apple Music needn’t track down their iPhone or iPad, navigate to the bespoke app, and find the song/album/playlist they want to hear. That can take a considerable amount of cognitive and visual energies, depending on one’s needs and tolerances. Instead, HomePod mini alleviates said friction by again enabling a person to use their voice to control Apple Music. What’s more, the smart speaker’s Intercom feature, which lets users send home-wide messages to other connected HomePods in the house, is an accessible way to make announcements to a group—for example, dinner being ready—without necessarily having to type a group text in iMessage or, even worse, walk around the house relaying the message as though they were a small-scale version of Paul Revere.
Intercom has extra functionality too, as there’s an option to send a transcript of the audio message to recipients. This can be particularly beneficial for people of mixed abilities in the same household. If I were born two decades later but still be a CODA, I could have used Intercom to tell my brother, who also is hearing, dinner is ready while the same message gets transformed into a text message for our fully Deaf parents.
Apple rightly positions the smart home aspect of HomePod as convenient, but the aforementioned few sentences on Intercom perfectly illustrate why convenience and accessibility are not interchangeable. Intercom indeed may be convenient to some people, but may be indispensable in terms of accessibility for others who, again, live with Deaf or hard-of-hearing family members. It’s these kinds of use cases that the mainstream tech media fail to consider in their assessment of smart home devices like HomePods, Amazon Echos, and the like. To judge them purely on intelligence and feature set misses an extraordinarily important part of their story. Smart speakers are exponentially more valuable than sheerly being a proverbial genie in a bottle that answers pithy questions about world knowledge or the weather. Taken in crucial context, devices like HomePod mini exemplify what accessibility and assistive technologies ultimately do: give disabled people increased agency and autonomy in living their everyday lives.
To reiterate an earlier point, that HomePod mini now comes in a new color is a good opportunity to remind people that accessibility matters.
As a personal anecdote, I have three HomePods in the house: one OG model from 2018 and two minis. They all sound great for playing music and podcasts—the original HomePod especially still goes strong despite Apple labelling it “vintage”—but I relish them for accessibility. They make controlling the floor lamps in our bedroom and living room more accessible while acting as chimes for when our Nest Hello doorbell rings.
Convenience is one thing, but accessibility is quite another altogether.