Apple’s new feature a step towards digital apartheid

Maybe Apple should take accessibility more seriously then? I'm a Voiceover user on iOS and accessibility has been regressing recently. Two examples I can think of include the fact that in the last several releases of iOS Voiceover can no longer read an entire article in the news app with out losing focus as well as the fact that all reviews in the app store have "developer response" announced even when none are available. Apple also appears to make no effort to engage with the accessibility community in the same way Microsoft or Google do. While Apple may have been a pioneer in accessibility I'm starting to look at cheep Android One phones to determine if I can switch from iOS.

As a blind user I don't want an easy way for websites or add tracking code to know if I'm using a screen reader. If this feature has to exist then it should be a site by site option that is disabled by default. I can then make the choice to determine if I want a site to know I'm using a screen reader based on the reasoning the site is asking. A blog does not need to know if I'm using a screen reader while a single page app may. I would argue that if a site has screen reader specific code they are doing things wrong but at least having to manually enable the option on a specific site would allow me to decide if the downsides of the site knowing I am blind are worth the reasoning they ask me to enable it.

Actually we can build responsive web sites by sending to everybody the same HTML and CSS. Then the browser decides how to display the page given the media queries and the window size.

What a browser usually does is getting the images with the appropriate resolution, so the web server can infer something about the user setup Eben with JavaScript disabled.

However a web service tracks only what it decides to track and it can provide a responsive experience without tracking anything.