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Comment by smacktoward | Hacker News Reader

iOS 7 foregoes borders, instead relying on colour to indicate interactivity

Good thing there aren't people out there who are color-blind, then...

Oh, wait.

That's me! I was browsing the new UI guidelines and couldn't understand what was and what wasn't a link/action in the screenshots that they used for examples! And I shouldn't need to turn on accessibility services for slight colorblindness... the design should accomodate for us.

The navigation looks lik the same color as the "Home" and "Phone" labels. Are those actions?

I'm worried about this.

My experience of Windows mobile is Windows 8 on a tablet, and I had pretty much nothing but contempt for it. And failed to see anything stylish about it at all!

I want links/buttons/actions to stand out. That doesn't mean it has to look like a button. It could be text with a halo, a shadow, or an effect that comes into play as you begin to interact with the device so the controls jump out at you, or are overlayed or something. Don't just present raw text at me. Though having said that, I'm sure Apple will make it work, where others haven't.

iOS 6 looks pretty infantile by comparison, but the new screenshots and icons don't look that nice or that cohesive either.

(I was hoping that they might just drop the old school 'i' from iOS and just call it Apple mobile OS or something, it grates my ears and eyes, the name is like soo 1999.)

The thing that I notice from the stills is that the typeface appears quite weak. I had the same issue with Windows 8, my eyes just can't read it comfortably, I'm not sure why that is - and it looks more diluted now - and there is less contrast in general. Though perhaps it will look okay on a retina display.

The Metro interface works well for a phone format device. Literally everyone I know picks up my Lumia and just uses it as if they've been using it for years. It just makes sense and is really intuitive. Also, apart from a big chunk of 3rd party apps written by morons, it's 100% consistent and smooth as anything even on the shittiest of handsets.

I've had at least 4 people I know toss their iOS device in favor of a WP8 handset in the last couple of months.

Windows 8 however is a stinking turd. It doesn't work for that in the same way that your metro signs aren't 40' advertising boards. Most of the UI is empty and pointless padding resulting in no visual cues and terrible usability.

Go and play with a phone sized device for a bit and see how you get on.

Looking at examples using XScope color blind modes, the default colors, and a few different colors (such as reds and greens), iOS7 is far more legible in color blind reduced palettes than iOS6 is that I can see.

If you turn on the "thicken text" (not the actual name) in accesability, they stand out even more.

Apple will take a note from Xbox at E3 and tell its customers with impairments to "Stay with iOS 6".

Ouch!

When someone first described the idea of theming, as in something like CSS and HTML, I totally got it. Can't apps use a descriptive semantic language underneath and just have the OS skin most of it for you?

Swapping themes and making applications and the OS more accessible thereafter would surely be much easier. I know I'm simplifying things somewhat, but isn't this the next evolution in responsive design?

I'd find it someone hard to think that apple would eschew accessibility Perhaps high contrast mode will exist at the very least! Even Windows 8 has made a few inroads.

This is essentially what the OS does if you use the standard controls. You say "I want a title bar at the top of the screen with a back button" and iOS 6 interprets this as the shiny ones you're used to, while 7 sees this as the new version. The problem is that the amount of variation you're allowed by apple is pretty slim. You can change the tint of the bar (UINavigationBar) and the text, provide an image to be the title instead of text....and that's about it before it might start breaking when they go from one version to the next.

Because things were the same for so long (IMHO that's why anyway) we've seen a lot of devs bringing their own ui items that looked similar but slightly different to the standard elements, I assume in the attempt to stand out visually. Apps like tapBots' TweetBot will likely be OK because they most likely don't use ANY of the standard UI elements, but apps that use a little custom and a little standard stuff have a lot of work cut out for them.

There is a high contrast mode. And the entire web mainly uses color to differentiate between links and normal text ie. many omit the underlining. So not sure what makes iOS so different in this regard.

Not underlining links is a web anti-pattern, a concession made in the name of looking nice while at the same time being more confusing. Looking nice is very important for web designers at this time, so usability is neglected...

It can't really be considered an anti-pattern when nearly every website on the Internet does it in one form or another.

"the entire web mainly uses color to differentiate between links and normal text"

I sense hyperbole, but would love to know what the actual proportion is. I suspect the majority of text links (as opposed to, e.g. menu navigation) are underlined.

I thought about this too, but then realized it's a completely moot point unless you are black/white color blind (which virtually nobody is).

Differing colors are NOT being used to indicate differing actions. They're just being used to indicate interactivity in general, and it doesn't matter if you see that indicator as red or green (the most common form of colorblindness).

You hint at it, but there are more flavors of color blindness than red/green. When I learned that my (former) boss was color-blind, I spend an hour on wikipedia and learned way more about color blindness than I had realized there was to know.

Other forms of colorblindness are incredibly rare.

As someone who is colour blind, I don't see this being much of an issue. If the colours are strong and stark enough (which it looks like they are) the vast majority of people who are colour-blind won't have any issues.

A friend of mine that do not see green will love it (she sees mostly only red, green she sees as 100% colorless, and blue she sees partially)

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