To Assist Blind Users, iPhone 14 and 14 Pro Has A Startup Sound Now

Since the release of the iPhone 12, Apple has been gradually adding new features that improve the user experience. One of these is the ability to play a sound when the device starts up and shuts down. This is a chime similar to those played by generations of Macs.

Steve Moser, an iOS developer, noticed the feature in the GM code for iOS 16.0. He tweeted that the feature had been added because “a lot of Blind and low vision people, even inside the company, wished for a concrete way to tell whether their phone restarted.”

Given how useful this would be as an accessibility feature, and that this is a change spotted in the operating system code, some iPhone owners have expressed hope that it might be offered to all handsets capable of running iOS 16. However, it appears that the feature will be limited to the iPhone 14. Aquino says he was told it’s for iPhone 14 only, and some commenters have even predicted that it might be limited to this year’s Pro models