The iPad was meant to revolutionize accessibility
technologyreview.com
technologyreview.com
My wishlist for accessibility: louder speaker (as the article mentions), and accessibility settings for a simplified patient-mode UI/UX versus a full-featured caregiver-mode. For example, zero-visibility interfaces (such as swipe up from bottom) are too complex for many of my users to understand and use. I'm hoping that as SwiftUI matures, adding a simpler UI/UX will become easier.
https://medium.com/the-useful-tech/apples-new-accessibility-...
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/bundleresources/in...
There isn't any other way to further integrate into the feature though.
Could someone not build the case you mention (shock, spill proof, easy hold) with a big speaker in it?
Not sure if you know this, but the latest iPhone SE still uses the iPhone 8 body complete with home button. Depending on which phone he's on, it might be a good idea to upgrade; all of the rumors that I've heard are that Apple will make the next SE on a different body.
Changing to the newer iOS was challenging for her due to the significantly smaller and pushed to the top call answering buttons. Apple does a lot for accessibility, but I really wish they had an “old persons mode”.
In the meantime, you should be able to solve the call banner issue through a relatively hidden setting; Settings > Phone > Incoming Calls > "Full Screen" should put things back to the way they were.
[0] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2023/05/apple-previews-live-s...
I really dislike the little banner thing and much prefer a full-screen image of whoever's calling.
I know because one of my previous iPod Touch devices had a broken physical home button so I used the assistive mode sofware button instead.
This might also work for people who are too old to understand how to use the phone without the physical button.
I kept a PC working for my Dad the hard way for years. Luckily when his previous email client became unworkable and confusing we managed to switch him to google mail (which I could more easily help with remotely) and he could be talked through the TeamViewer settings. He carried on using that for several years, delighted to be able to email people, until his interest in using the PC began to drift as he got to 90, mostly I think because it became more difficult for him to read (it is amazing how much the eye's transmission of/sensitivity to light changing over time makes interfaces more difficult or can even make them seem "new", and that is when the interfaces were not changing or doing unpredictable things).
But we never managed to really get him to use a mobile phone. He could do that only fitfully despite some great device designs, and he would reject them quickly. He would forget to charge them, lose the chargers etc., and sometimes would confuse charge and signal strength, or assume he had to switch off the phone to save money.
He would likely know how to use a mobile in an emergency, but of course the day he first wandered off and completely disappeared for hours, he didn't think that was an emergency at all!
As another poster says, I would take this opportunity to upgrade to the last SE with a button while you can. There's a very good chance his muscle-memory skills will translate just fine, but I suspect you are right about swiping up.
FWIW I think swipes starting "beyond the screen", as the Palm guys used to say, is a bad design. I think the number of top-down swipes in iPadOS is confusing and annoying, and I'm not that much more than half the age my dad reached.
I wish you the best in continuing to support this sort of stuff for as long as your father needs it -- keeping someone able to use technology is not just a "nice to have", it's a connection to the modern world that means a lot.
iOS also sucks in that trying to load all his favorite shows for when we are out is near impossible (I have them loaded on an SD card on the fire). Ideal, no, but when he's stressed he throws a blanket over his head and tunes into a show he likes to control what he can. It gets us through the day.
But certainly, a SD card is cheap storage.
Often they overlap with other "swipe" features giving unexpected results
There is no manual to explain them (that I know of), one must stumble across them which often leads to frustrating results.
One of those swipes (notifications) fights with every other top-down swipe in an app _and_ the window-dragging swipe in Stage Manager, which only works on the three dots.
I find these frustrating and I have no co-ordination issues.
If you're going to tie fundamental behaviour to unintuitive behaviour, then you have to make sure it's both easy to perform once learnt, and that you actually teach people how to use it.
Here are a few things that the iPad afforded her with no other easy options:
- The tracking webcam let her facetime with us without needing completely steady hands or even the capability to hold the iPad properly.
- The huge amount of accessories that let her use a pen (when capable), drop the iPad without risk of breaking, hold the iPad in various ways let us easily customise the ergonomics for her capabilities at various times.
- Shortcuts and automation let us ensure volume was always maximised during Facetime calls with us, set the volume lower at night so she didn't disurb the ward, have easy to press buttons to call certain family members, and even reset the volume and screen brightness when nurses changed it.
She chose the music to her own funeral, made drawings when she could, played games, and even drafted some pages of a book she left for us after her passing, letting her talk to us one last time. Maybe the author of the link disagrees, but seeing the difference in quality of the calls when she didn't have to worry about getting frustrated about trying to frame her face and everything was night and day.
Because who "meant it" to? Did they have any influence? Who stated it as a goal? Do you just mean that a bunch of pundits said it and now you want to be a pundit saying they were wrong?
In the specific case: did Apple ever say they would "revolutionise" accessibility, outright? Or did they just do what they've been doing since the iPhone: slowly, progressively trying to make accessibility a bit better and a bit more normalised?
I'm sure everyone who needs greater accessibility thinks Apple could do more. But I'm pretty sure they think everyone else is even further behind.
(I think Apple could do a couple of things much better -- one of those things would be endorsing or supplying a GPIO/I2C/SPI/CAN etc. bridge device with some official API support)
Apple, nor any other major company, is likely to sink major resources into helping non-verbal people communicate unless there is a way to use those improvements in a bigger market.
But with that said, the article is well written and worth a read for anyone that comes to the comments before clicking the link.
Very domain-specific though, not general purpose. Revolutionary perhaps in care terms but not for accessibility more broadly.
There’s tons of built in accessibility features(https://www.apple.com/ca/accessibility/) and more coming in the new OS (https://www.apple.com/ca/newsroom/2023/05/apple-previews-liv...). It’s also simplified a lot of accessibility development for third party providers.
So I think anyone expecting a revolution was setting their expectations up for failure.
Though I think the title and initial premise of the article are selling the actual issue short. There is definitely a lack of financially accessible and intuitive accessibility software for their daughter's needs and others like her.
It’s definitely an area that could see more general solutions appear, and I wish the description of what they need wasn’t buried so far down the page because the actual problem at hand is very interesting.
But the article also reveals a very sad story about the mother of a disabled child who longs for an "implanted brain chip" which will enable her daughter to "transmit [her] thoughts wirelessly" and communicate like other children.
> Could a brain chip allow my daughter to verbally express herself with the same minimal effort it takes me to open my mouth and speak? How might she sound, telling me about her day at school? Singing “Happy Birthday” or saying “Mama”?
It's part of a bigger trend of parents of disbled children in the AAC world. The fantasy of AAC is that all the cases are like Helen Keller, or Stephen Hawkings, or Roger Ebert, intelligent motivated individuals with mechanical impediments to traditional means of communicating, but they're not, and technology won't change that.
Demo here: https://twitter.com/scosman/status/1608173613340917763
Top level ideas:
- LLMs to reduce typing. Expand single words into complete sentences easily, and predict next sentence without typing.
- Voice to text to LLM: listen to ambient conversation, and offer contextual replies with zero typing?
- New UI for text input leveraging the dynamic touchscreen of the iPad. No need to move hands, kinda like modern and user friendly Morse code.
Hadn’t seen Dasher but checking it out now!
All the rest is just made up fluff.
What does that mean?
I assume it's a complaint about how iOS devices are computing appliances - they're much less open than the PCs that they've come after.
From my point of view, I'm extremely glad that they're computing appliances and mostly locked down. The younger people here probably have never had the "pleasure" of removing 568 "helpful" toolbars from IE6. For people who just want to use a few applications, a locked down device is simply superior to a more open computer.
Once the EU enforces their external app store policy, you won't be forced into using non-Apple software. You can still continue using your iPhone exactly the way you do today, with the option of letting it do more if you ever wanted. It is truly a win-win situation unless your main source of income is Apple stocks.
I'm ambivalent about the EU regulations. But it'll be interesting to see what happens, and whether consoles are next, and what that means.
I already have to educate and then console when they fall for email or SMS scams. Are you really saying that means I have to accept a new vector from scam stores that impersonate the Apple app store and just charge $100 for "Free" apps?
This regulation will be good for techies AND good for fraudsters. We don't have to pretend there is no downside.
Yes? It's rather important that they know how to distinguish the two. If they aren't honing these skills, what's stopping them from logging into a fake iCloud dialogue on someone's random website, or feeding their SSN to the "IRS" over the phone?
It's not like... a naive request. Talk to aging adults about fraud. They will be subjected to it as long as they have some form of individual agency. It sucks, but it's better than telling ourselves fairytales like "it doesn't exist here, though!"
I still don’t see why that means government-mandated removal of a consumer protection is an unmitigated good thing. I guess it’s an idealism I just don’t share.
I’m not opposed to the EU regulation; I am a fan of policy experimentation. But I do expect EU to see a huge increase in scams and fraud, which I guess we should celebrate?
DRM-locking your tires to certain manufacturers is a good thing, arguably. The manufacturer has exact measurements and can arguably make safer tires than anyone else.
...that's not an excuse to allow it, though. Yes, by allowing third-party tire manufacturers we sacrifice a bit of safety. If safety is a foremost concern of the OEM, they can work with third-party manufacturers to ensure they keep the users safe too.
> But I do expect EU to see a huge increase in scams and fraud, which I guess we should celebrate?
Again - putting a web browser and cell phone onto an iPod ushered in 2 new avenues for fraud. The number of people who were being scammed on-the-go skyrocketed after the release of the iPhone. That doesn't make it a defacto bad release though, and most people would argue both features were a net-positive. So yeah, people did celebrate that newfound freedom. You don't have to use it - you can be the sort of Luddite who only uses Apple Applications and calls the web a hive of scum and villainy if you want. But other people will use it, and probably enjoy and celebrate the feature. Lord knows Mac and Android users have.
Until publishers decide to launch their own app store and remove games from the app store, forcing me to create accounts and store payment details with them.
Then, poeple like me who explicitly purchased apple devices because this is a feature, are forced to have a "choice" between install the app and the store of their proviser, or no app. That's a lose in my book.
App Store transaction fees amortize the costs of development/operations of not just the store itself but the OS it all runs on. If you pay 99¢ for an app that covers re-downloads and multiple devices in perpetuity. All running on a global CDN with exceptional uptime.
Apple doesn't charge users a dime for new iOS upgrades over years of the life of the device. Even years old devices get the latest software features of new iOS versions. Supporting old devices has a non-zero development cost.
Considering how Apple makes almost 50% hardware margins on every iPhone sold, I think they make plenty enough to continue software support off the initial hardware sale alone.
Jobs never really wanted "general purpose computing". He wanted computing that he controlled from the top down.
And the NeXT, Jobs' next project, was actually quite open. For the time, anyways.
I think he was fairly schizo on this topic. Or just deferred to his engineers where it mattered on certain things.
It didn't even have to start out that way; sure, keep that competitive advantage for a few years. But by today, you really should be able to develop an app or whatever for the iPad with ZERO friction and ZERO permission from Apple.
I think interjecting one’s own ideals into someone else’s problems is a bit uncouth.
The article even goes over how prior to the iPad, AAC providers would go to their own hardware solutions.
OSS is meaningless to the why. It may be a solution but if it was the reason, then OSS has similarly failed the market even more.
I have no idea what you think "ideals" and "being uncouth" have to do with any of this; referring to OSS as e.g. an "ideology" strikes me as a weird misunderstanding of its present role in tech. It's not theory, fam, damn near the entire cloud runs on it today.
Yet none of them meet the goal here. So clearly the open sourceness of the platforms is not what’s holding things back.
The reason I mention ideals is because you came in to the discussion and effectively said “open source would solve this” but it’s such a non sequitur from the problem at hand, especially given the history of the field.
You’re interjecting your own belief that the lack of ann open source platform is the reason without actually bothering to understand the problem space involved and the players that exist.
Just because the cloud runs on open source doesn’t mean much for this. The cloud also runs on closed source hardware.
Most of the mobile hardware is closed source, i.e requiring closed sourced drivers so building a fully open source mobile OS is always problematic.
I used to root heavily for Nokia but imho the only thing that killed it off was how late they were to the game in pushing it and how they’d already significantly declined as a company by then.
To my knowledge, iPad and iOS have been a leap for accessibility. Prior, you’d have to spend thousands on speech setups instead of a few hundred.
Its walled garden also affords accessibility given that there’s much less of a chance for adware and malware to infect people’s devices and confuse them due to the much lower complexity compared to linux, Windows and even Max OS
https://developer.apple.com/wwdc23/10034
> The Dwell Control accessibility feature allows people to select and interact with the UI without using their hands.
There’s also Pointer Control in that talk which provides alternatives to eye control.
Note: I obviously haven’t tried this since it’s just Apple’s own videos on it, nor am I someone who would need to. So I can’t speak to the efficacy of those input models. but just relaying the information.
> Personal Voice helps people with speech loss create a voice that sounds like them, and use it with Live Speech to communicate in calls and conversations.
It mostly worked.
then again, the hard truth is there's no percentage in accessibility software. not to say no one can make money doing it, but it's basically a bounded market. the driver of improvements will probably be as boomers start aging more: they'll live longer, but at a lower quality of life, so need stuff to help them get by. and it'll be a big enough market to justify serious attention.
i think this quote from the guy illustrates his misunderstanding pretty well: "It’s hard to think that non-disabled consumers would be expected to accept the same slow pace of incremental improvement for as essential a human function as speech." see of course it's reasonable to expect that tech for normal people improves faster, it's a massively larger market.
"To compensate for the small market size, developers backed into a convoluted business model that required a physician or licensed speech pathologist to formally “prescribe” the device, strategically (and astronomically) priced to subsidize the cost of its development." case in point. stuff made for a small group of people is gonna run pricey, that's to be expected. feels like this guy is mad no one's built a 99 cent app for an ipad so his daughter has that tech easily. i get the frustration, but it's a pretty tiny market so if i'm fred the app builder i'm not about to go out and address that as my first choice.
new tech starts off pareto optimal: putting in 20% of the effort to capture 80% of the market. that's also how we iterate faster. i think it's one of those cases where insisting accessibility software be given equal attention at every stage of the technology life cycle would long-term slow things down for everyone, all in the name of some fuzzy principle of equality of outcome.