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Comment by mlang23 | Hacker News Reader

Apple killed one of the best voiceover enabled single-player poker simulator about 2 years ago. THETAPoker was absolutely great, and the author invested a lot of time and energy to make the game perfectly self-voicing. Until Apple review falsely identified it as a gambling-app which needs to be banned. The author tried to get someone to listen at apple, and was totally ignored. Now, Apple has a similar poker simulator, called hold'em, which is by far not as good regarding VoiceOver support. It feels like a scam to kick someone from the AppStore who did a very good job just to make your own botched copy-cat app more prominent.

That said, Apple VoiceOver is still one of the best shipped-by-default accessibility systems. However, we have to thank Steve Jobs for this. If it were only for Tim Cook, apple wouldn't even know how to spell accessibility.

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> Apple VoiceOver is still one of the best shipped-by-default accessibility systems

Which is frightening, because two years ago I had a terrible experience trying to modify a web app to be accessible using VoiceOver (I gave up after over a week of solid effort).

We couldn’t afford[1] to pay a third party to modify our 100% custom HTML framework[2], and VoiceOver seemed the most approachable for me to try and see how far I could progress on making our web app accessible.

VoiceOver just felt so very buggy - although perhaps the issue was the integration of VoiceOver within Mobile Safari (my dev experience is that Mobile Safari is a steaming pile of problems - current example is that iPadOS15 Safari crashes twice on many pages then goes blank so you can’t use it!).

As a dev, there also needs to be some better online training for using VoiceOver, since small teams do not have easy access to a colleague that uses it.

[1] We could pay 100% blind users to give us feedback, but couldn’t afford to pay a skilled team to consult and do the work.

[2] Custom framework because we started our product before reliable frameworks existed. Modern components are often designed to support accessibility out of the box, which is far preferable!

I was wondering if just my MacBook had an issue since Safari just goes to a blank white when opening New Relic, but I guess Safari is having this strange problem a lot more than that.

I have Google Sheets that have a moderate number of cells (~500k, so 10% of the maximum allowed), and I can’t get mobile Safari to load them most of the time. When they do load, it is invariably impossible to switch tabs more than once within the sheet.

Luckily, Chrome for iOS exists :(

Chrome for iOS uses the same safari rendering engine as third party browser engines are not allowed. So very curious if it works in iOS Chrome but not Safari as it’s mostly the same.

Also for your specific use case (I realise you were making a point) would be worth using the app I guess.

Hmm didn’t know they use the same rendering engine, but the success rate is not the same.

The Google Sheets app is a no-go because it kept using stale data for some reason. The sheets are regularly updated via script, and the app would constantly fail to show recent data.

Well, if you lack accessibility experience, and insist that a week of hackery on a custom framework should be enough, that is not VoiceOvers fault. Accessibility is a serious thing, not something you can do as a side project while waiting till the baby wakes up.

I believe accessibility is critical, and I was expecting to invest months of time and a significant amount of our money on the project. I cut my losses after over a week of full time effort because I was not making enough progress. One personal fault of mine is often the opposite, where I don’t quit early enough, and I keep flogging a dead horse.

Also, I think you are making many assumptions about me in your response: perhaps try to be a little more generous towards others.

Crash might be related to: https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/690429

Apple's Texas Hold'em actually dates to 2006.

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