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Comment by joshmanders | Hacker News Reader

There will always be tinkerers and people who want to customize their stuff to their personality, but I think the majority of people don't want to tinker, they want to "get shit done" and the standard wallpaper and theming of stuff now days is visually pleasing enough to not mess with it.

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Personally I couldn't care less about things being "visually pleasing", to me this is an accessibility feature. People with sight issues or dyslexia might want to use different fonts and weights, they might want high contrast colors, etc. The aesthetic personalization opportunities are second to that.

More importantly: this isn't hard. They did it in Windows 3, an OS that had an 8MB install size and required a mere 2MB of RAM. That we can't provide this functionality in 2021 with all these supposedly highly skilled software "engineers" who consider themselves so ridiculously productive because of all the complicated abstractions they use, on hardware that is several orders of magnitude more powerful than was available to Win 3... well it's completely ridiculous and we, as an industry, should be ashamed.

> They did it in Windows 3, an OS that had an 8MB install size and required a mere 2MB of RAM

Technically Windows 3 required only 384KB of RAM... Windows 3.1 required 1MB (in Standard mode).

I’m curious - have you experimented with the range of accessibility options in Mac OS?

Are there particular ones that are missing when it comes to dyslexia?

I don't run MacOS on any of the PCs I own, so no. Neither do I have any of the disabilities mentioned. I just feel that being able to change colors and fonts is a significantly broader and more simple solution than bespoke accessibility features tuned for specific disabilities.

> I don't run MacOS on any of the PCs I own, so no. Neither do I have any of the disabilities mentioned.

So what I'm understanding is you're saying an OS that is used by a LOT of people, is inaccessible, but you neither have any of the disabilities nor the OS you're complaining about to back this claim up?

Because macOS has tons of accessibility options including font sizes, etc.

I never claimed MacOS was inaccessible. I don't even use MacOS, and haven't since about 10.1. I don't believe I've made any claims about MacOS at all, actually.

Default wallpapers are sometimes so good that people import them to other OSes :D

Additionally, vendors just want to ship software. I guess that's their version of getting shit done. For better or worse, functionality sells most software. The stock UI is an afterthought, let alone possible customizations to it. Spending time on features that at best don't sell, and, at worst, can introduce bugs, is a non-starter for most shops.

Maybe Microsoft/Apple are big enough that they can (and should) handle it, but I wouldn't generally expect this type of gold plating.

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