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Comment by bigdict | Hacker News Reader

"Assistive Access distills experiences across the Camera, Photos, Music, Calls, and Messages apps on iPhone to their essential features in order to lighten their cognitive load for users."

I might use this myself even though I'm not disabled.

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> I might use this myself even though I'm not disabled.

Also see curb cuts (1)

(1) https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/curb-cuts/

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Curb_cut_effect&o...

Not all disabilities are permanent! Sometimes you're just situationally disabled, i.e. you're in the car, or carrying a child, or sleep-deprived, or just stressed out.

Accessibility features can help everyone.

Agreed. Presenting this feature solely as a tool for users with cognitive disabilities might undersell its potential. There's a significant number of smartphone users who only utilize a small fraction of the available features and would prefer a simpler interface focusing on the 10% of features they actually use. Interestingly, this demographic includes both less tech-literate users, who might feel overwhelmed by the complexity, and extremely tech-literate users who know exactly what they need and prefer clean, distraction-free tools.

My 84 year old mother does remarkably well with her suite of Apple products. However, it would be nice to simplify some things. She only calls or chats with a limited number of people. Reworking the phone and messenger apps to use large pictures of the people would be a benefit. Something similar for the camera / photos app would be great as well.

You can pin messages in iMessage, which turns it into a big photo. Also when you hit the search button in Photos it’ll show you big images of people’s faces if you want to see photos of a particular person (if you’ve trained your phone on those faces).

I do wish the “favorites” view in the phone app made the headshots big like iMessage, though.

Accessibility is for everyone.

Time to rethink your understanding of disability.

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