This has an interesting history. I’m struggling to find it and hope I have it right. John Gruber or maybe Accidental Tech Podcast did a segment on an podcast ages ago in relation to accessibility settings on the iPhone.
Whoever it was credited a particular Apple engineer who pushed hard with accessibility features arguing that at some point, everyone has some sort of issue (sight, hearing, movement etc).
I’ve tried, but can’t find the episode, which is a shame as this sort of thing is Apple at its best, which does get lost in the swamp of depressing decisions they have made in recent years.
It's nice that they try, but I wish the accessibility features weren't so terrible.
Case in point: I put off getting a new prescription, and ended up setting the font size up + enabling bold text on my iPhone. The first party apps often don't work well.
Of everything on my phone, GasBuddy handled it best. It's basically unusable with large fonts, but it suggested I go into per-app settings and disable display accessibility settings just for it. Now that I know that's a thing, I can blacklist the 90% of apps on the phone that don't display right, I guess.
Since the new glasses arrived, I'll probably just disable accessibility. However, my experience doesn't bode well for people that actually need reading glasses and want to use their phones when they're out and about.
One of the main reasons most apps do poorly here is our designers and PMs NEVER think about anything other than the standard size iPhone at normal font size in light mode. This is true at every company i worked at.
In Apple 1p apps the reason is also that the codebase is 15 years old now and very hard to make adaptive.
I felt this keenly when my children were very young. At times I only had one arm/hand free because I was holding a child in the other. Or I could only read poorly in the dark because I didn’t want to turn on the lights and disturb the kids.
Since then I always see accessibility thinking as a universal benefit, not just for the “abled”.
This is awesome, and this type of accessibility (noting that it can be temporary, permanent or situational) and consideration is known as inclusive design in modern parlance.
This has an interesting history. I’m struggling to find it and hope I have it right. John Gruber or maybe Accidental Tech Podcast did a segment on an podcast ages ago in relation to accessibility settings on the iPhone.
Whoever it was credited a particular Apple engineer who pushed hard with accessibility features arguing that at some point, everyone has some sort of issue (sight, hearing, movement etc).
I’ve tried, but can’t find the episode, which is a shame as this sort of thing is Apple at its best, which does get lost in the swamp of depressing decisions they have made in recent years.