I love accessibility features because they might be the last features developed solely with the benefit of the user in mind. So many other app/os features are designed to steal your attention or gradually nerf usefulness.
Even outside of this, even able-bodied folks can be disabled due to illness, surgery, injury, etc. So it's great to see Apple continuing to support accessibility.
Recommend creating a Shortcut to toggle this setting.
Huh?
It's not built-in?
Android (or at least Moto) has it for years, auto enable on the schedule or the sunrise/sunset.
Dim backlight + Red color filter can make the screen almost invisible to those around you.
It’s attached to an automation for sleep and wake focus it works really well. I added an explicit run requirement for wake so that I could sleep in without getting blasted in the face with white. There’s a notification with a run button which I can wait until I’m truly up to hit.
https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/4bcfd8fc02074316aaae3503d07...
The app is overall darker and more "strict" with how it handles content (esp. images) though: https://untested.sonnet.io/Heart+of+Dorkness and midnight.sonnet.io
Overall, reduced the number of photons is a fun metric to play with when building something/messing with prototypes.
I don't care how cynical it sounds, user experience became user exploitation a long time ago. Big Tech have been running that gimmick at too-big-to-fail scale for the last decade or so.
And don’t get me started on hidden command line settings.
<cough> Reduce Motion. Is it an accessibility feature or does it just get rid of an annoyance and is good for everyone?
Yes--some people can become ill with certain types of motion on a screen [1].
[1]: https://www.a11yproject.com/posts/understanding-vestibular-d...
Personally I forgot about it on my latest phone because I had a fresh prescription for my glasses and didn't need to enlarge the font at the moment :)
From outside, it feels like these are the only people with the freedom to improve the user experience at all. So they have to hide their work in the Accessibility preferences.
There's nothing that inherently "locks out" people who don't have a recognized disability from exploring these features. Furthermore, most of Apple's "accessibility" features are related to Vision/Hearing/etc (and categorized as such), so I think it's reasonable to consider them accessibility features.
Clearly based on other comments here, plenty of people discover these features and find them useful.
I'm glad the configuration is there, but it's hard to discover, so in and of itself it isn't accessible to find.
This isn’t “hidden”. It was even called out and demonstrated in the iOS 14 keynote.
Most people don't go into that menu to look around for things they might want to use cause features that almost everyone could benefit from are alongside settings for people with visual and hearing impairments.
The bar is pretty high. There are already hundreds of settings. Each one adds cost and complexity. So even if it's a good idea, the leadership might say "no".
Now let's say this same setting makes a big difference in usability for some people with disabilities. You just want to put it in accessibility settings. It won't clutter the rest of the UI.
You just turned your "no" into a "yes".
Hopefully accessibility features are never artificially segmented to higher priced devices.
If it requires a chip that supports specific operations, and entry tier devices have an older chip, that wouldn't be a violation.
Source: purchased devices until finding one that worked, since Apple docs indicated the feature should work on all iPhones that can run iOS 17.
Edit: audio descriptions in Magnifier are non-functional on iPad Air, working on M2 iPad Pro.
Over here in Europe, where there's no lawsuit culture, some laws (not necessarily accessibility-related, our legislation in that area is far weaker) are violated almost without repercussions. When the government is the only party that can bring charges and the government is complacent / ineffective, nobody actually gets charged and nothing gets done.
There's also the problem of incentives, if you can get a lot of money from a lawsuit, you have a far better incentive to sue and find a competent lawyer. You may even deliberately look for and sue violators as a moneymaking scheme, some companies in the US do this. This puts pressure on businesses to comply with the law. Even if you're piss-poor and never sue anybody, you still benefit.
If this lawsuit culture doesn't exist, the best you can do is write a report to the government and hope they actually act on it. Many people don't know how to write these, and since there's no money in it, getting a lawyer to do it for you is an expense that nobody is going to help you recoup.
The people handling these reports don't help either, they're usually 9-to-5 salaried employees who aren't judged too hard on performance, so they have far less of an incentive to actually pursue cases.
Google is worse at this, Talkback multi-finger gestures used to be Pixel and Samsung exclusive for a while, even though there was no technical reason for it.
Apple has a different problem, many accessibility features aren't internationalized properly. Screen recognition still has issues on non-english systems, so do image descriptions. Voice Over (especially on Mac) didn't include voices for some of the less-popular languages until very recently, even though Vocalizer, their underlying speech engine, has supported them for years. Siri has the same problem.
Shit. I’m turning into one of those negative downers. I’m sorry. I’ve had too much internet today.
> Apps must respect the user’s permission settings and not attempt to manipulate, trick, or force people to consent to unnecessary data access. For example, apps that include the ability to post photos to a social network must not also require microphone access before allowing the user to upload photos.
Lots of iOS apps today really want to mine your address book, and constantly spam you with dialogs to enable it, but they don't go as far as disabling other features until you grant them access, because they'd get rejected once someone noticed.
Unfortunately, poor Americans cannot taste the freedom that Europeans have to be abused by developers.
To compare this to a non-monetized accessibility feature is a bit disingenuous.
The whole notion of ‘fairness’ is that gatekeepers should allow others to compete on even footing. That can be fulfilled by granting EITHER everybody OR nobody access to the market (but not: only yourself).
A big clue is that the world in it doesn’t make a ton of internal sense and the episode makes absolutely no effort to smooth that over. The questions it raises and leaves open without even attempting an answer are on purpose. You’re supposed to go “god, bicycling to make little pellets? Just to buy useless trash? God, why? It’s so pointless,” or, “they truly look down on and are mean to the people who get demoted, even though they’re basically guaranteed to end up that way someday, when their health or good fortune run out? Just cruelty for no reason that’s highly likely to hit them some day, too? That’s insane!”
… because actually it’s about now (or, the year it came out) and the point is to get you to connect the dots and realize we’re doing the same crap and just don’t notice. It’s only “sci fi” as some sleight of hand to give you an alien’s eye view of our own actual society as a way to prompt reflection. The core story of the corruption of a “revolutionary” to serve the purposes of the system is some bog-standard media studies stuff pertaining to today, not sci fi. The reveal that they could just fucking stop all this and go outside, it’s not some alien world or a post apocalypse after all is yet another thing that’s supposed to make you go “what’s wrong with them? Oh. Right. It’s us.”[1]
Long winded way to say: we can’t “end up” at Fifteen Million Merits future-world, because it’s just our own world we’re already in.
[1] Some read the final scene as depicting yet another viewscreen, but this is such a wildly weaker reading as far as the how effective the scene is that I can’t believe it’s intended that way.
I don't see optimizing for that as bad. If they think we'll love the product more by making it better for a given audience, especially if I'm in that audience, I'm happy. Does that mean this company now gets richer? Perhaps, and that's fine by me
Growth at all costs, I guess.