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Comment by strawberrypuree | Hacker News Reader

This is why I have high respect for Apple, which routine ships new accessibility features and maintains them, despite them being very low usage. A few of those features end up becoming handy for non-accessibility users, like the ability to make your screen black and white on the iPhone or the ability to detect sounds.

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Tim Cook has famously told investors to fuck off (in slightly more polite language) for questioning the ROI of accessibility features.

Can you give me one example of this?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2014/03/07/why-tim...

The quote is "When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind, I don't consider the bloody ROI."

https://www.imore.com/apple-accessibility-human-right

I wonder (seriously) what the ROI on a statement like this might be. Is there a level where "responsibility to the shareholders" is sampled, or could it be a few layers of indirection away?

There is a pretty fine line between cynicism (i.e. it's just marketing) and idealism (ethical companies will generate a higher level of support), but I wonder how far this goes before a lawsuit shuts it down.

The business judgement rule gives company management pretty wide latitude in making business decisions so long as they are not blatantly fraudulent or conflicted. For example Shlensky v Wrigley[1] which concerns the owner of Wrigley field’s decision not to install lights and hold night games. A decision by their own admission motivated not by a business interest but by a personal belief that baseball is a “daytime sport”.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shlensky_v._Wrigley

Thank you, this is exactly what I was looking for.

I have no idea about accessibility on iOS, but on the web making a website more accessible will usually make it display faster simply because accessibility forces you down a road that stops you filling a site with bloat and rubbish. If people pushed for accessible websites everyone would benefit from lower bandwidth usage and faster rendering.

It's not unreasonable to think pushing for an accessible OS makes the rest of it better as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Center_for_Public_Pol...

Just curious, what's the non-accessibility use case for high contrast (black and white) on the iPhone?

Reducing phone addiction by making the phone less appealing to look at.

Ugh I tried this to keep off my phone before going to bed. Naturally I'm posting this before I go to bed, so that's about how well it works for me.

iOS 14 has some new Sleep stuff which semi-locks the phone at your "prepare for bed" time - you need to dismiss the "preparing for sleep" before you can unlock the phone.

Try using NextDNS to block HN. This is what I do on mobile -- I bury the NextDNS app in a folder and it requires several steps to un-do it. iOS 14 allows you to set DNS without using the VPN setting.

It does a better job than the color shifting when preparing for bed.

Let's not forget how Google enforced good accessibility practice on websites through SEO.

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