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Comment by cafed00d | Hacker News Reader

There will come a day when Apple will lean in heavily on Accessibility just like they've recently amped up Privacy in ads lately.

I, for one, absolutely love this about Apple! Accessibility is a beautiful core value to strive for (Privacy and others too). But I particularly appreciate Accessibility.

Good designs/affordances such as gestural trackpads or mouse cursor support on iPads are all accessibility features, except they cover a major swath of humanity rather than those traditionally considered "less-abled".

Disclaimer: I work at Apple so I'm biased. More likely, my heroes at Apple such as Sue Booker are accessibility experts -- so I'm always fan-boying over these features!

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I would just like to say that there isn't a company on the planet making consumer electronics that leans in harder than Apple does, as a quadriplegic I can get an able-bodied monkey to take my new iShiny out-of-the-box and from then on I can do everything you can do on that device.

They really are world leaders at this stuff, I can use my right index finger and my mouth and with just that I can use Apple products to run my own company and talk to people on HN (you know, the important stuff!). ---

edited to add: over the past few weeks Apple and their accessibility approach has come up a few times on HN, and when I responded there have been so many questions that I really really wanted to answer. However, not had the energy to be able to respond in a timely manner and certainly not quickly enough and set the article is still on the front page of HN. Basically because quadriplegia.

So I know that there are are a lot of questions about use my computer, and that's largely because The people on HN are genuinely and wonderfully curious.

The question that seems to fascinate able-bodied engineers goes something like this: "imagine coming home and finding somebody had removed every switch, button and lever from every device in your environment; What would you do?" That's the question I had to answer before I could get to where I don't get a job and have to start my own company as a result!

So my question is how best do people think I should share this information? Blog post, Twitter thread (eww) or messenger pigeon?

I would imagine a series of blog posts that you then turn into a book? I love your question about “...what would you do?” It reads like a writing prompt.

A podcast I listen to (maybe CodingBlocks.Net or ATP?) talked about a dev who uses a camera to track a shiny bit of tape over the bridge of their glasses as a mouse and speech (with their own phonetic alphabet variation) for typing and is able to create software at the same pace as an able bodied person - I’d love to hear all of those stories.

Could design a website that was the equivalent of "imagine coming home and finding somebody had removed every switch, button and lever from every device in your environment; What would you do?"

i.e. where "able-bodied" visitors would have to figure out how to interact with the site without all their usual means.

If you designed it right and maybe even gamified it (in a good way that doesn't trivialize, that challenges you to learn), it might entice young and old to explore what it means to have to interact with the world without the benefit of X.

A series of blog posts could serve as in invaluable resource for us caring but ultimately able-bodied code monkeys to refer to. If you go ahead with those, post them here. :)

If you could find a CHI researcher to work with it would make an amazing case-study for a research paper, and that would give it some longitivtiy as well as be a good basis for a more compact blog post.

Oh, they already did, circa 2004, and they never stopped.

They were the first mainstream company to release a screen reader, the first company ever to release a high-quality, free screen reader, the first to build one into the operating system, the first to make installing the OS accessible, the first to make touchscreens accessible for the blind, and that's not even all of it. The things we're seeing from Apple are just extraordinary, and beyond what anyone else provides. I've been a really happy iPhone user for years, and I recently got myself a Mac too. This technology literally changes our lives.

“They were the first mainstream company to release a screen reader”

I don’t think that’s correct. Microsoft Narrator is from 2000 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Narrator), voice-over from 2005 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Tiger)

The Mac had a screen reader in 1989, but that was third party software (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OutSpoken)

IIRC, Narrator was designed for use during OS installation. If so, “the first to make installing the OS accessible” isn’t correct, either.

sorry, by "release a screen reader" I meant "release a screen reader that was actually usable, and that people wanted to use". Narrator wasn't usable for almost anything until Windows 8, and that's when it started supporting OS configuration. Before then, it was mostly used for recovery, when your screen reader crashed and you needed to do one or two really simple things.

They do mention every now and then how the accessibility features enable quite a lot of people to use their devices like everybody else. But you're right: they should advertise it much more. it is consistent with their user-centric approach to privacy.

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