Accessibility is something that seldom gets the attention it deserves. Most of us go about our day without ever wondering how accessible an iPhone or iPad or Mac is to the blind or the deaf, to those with autism or motor disfunction, or how accessible the apps that run on them are. Yet there are people who do care deeply about accessibility. Those who need iPhones and iPads and Macs to be ever-more accessible, of course, and those working to make iPhone and iPads and Macs ever-more accessible. Among technology companies, Apple does a tremendous job not only implementing accessibility, but promoting it and prioritizing it as well. And it starts at the very top.
An area where Apple leads. It might not be an area that’s considered very sexy or flashy, but it’s hugely important for large numbers of people.
I read the article and felt that rare sense of, “Yes technology helping people. This is what it’s supposed to be about.” Then I read the comments and saw the author of the article promoting the notion of legislation to ‘encourage’ accessibility. Why do people always have to take a good idea too far?
Dude, if there’s anything legislation should be made for it’s accessibility. It’s just an extension of disability legislation, in essence.
When kneejerk anti-legislation reaction is fired up against something like accessibility or disability, you know you’ve gone too far down the ideologue path.
Not at all. In fact, if you think you need legislation, you’re going about it the wrong way. You can’t force something like this, you need to educate and show companies how accessibility will increase their customer base. Take it from me, someone who is completely blind and relies on accessibility every day of my life. Legislation will fail because, by human instinct, people react badly to things being shoved at them. Persuasion is far better than coersion.
Legislation shows these companies that we are an enemy, not a customer. Apple’s got it right, and have had it right for going on ten years now. I can rail against their draconian app controls and their patent bullshit and you bet your ass I always will, but when it comes to accessibility and how to go about it at least for the blind, Apple are the company that others should be modelling. No one else in the mainstream technology industry, and I mean no one, has taken this as seriously as Apple has.
You do realize the contradiction there. You say persuasion is better than coercion, yet in all these years ONLY Apple has done anything meaningful about it.
If only one company takes that seriously, then by definition, it’s NOT working.
People with disabilities had a hard time with public transport and pathways and building access, and no one really bothered until legislation was passed, and the US was a model for disabilities legislation (until they chose not to ratify the UN resolution that was modeled after the US).
News flash: They still don’t bother and in fact now we are fucking resented because of people like you that think everything needs to be legislated to hell. We are not seen as equals, we’re seen as self-entitled shitheads because often such laws were passed without the consultation of the very people they were supposed to help.
Only because idiots spread the myth that corporations need to be coddled and protected from legislation in case they throw a tantrum, so of course the corporations play along and pretend to be unduly put upon. Other countries have no problem putting corporations in their place, and there is no backlash because they know where their bread is buttered.
You only have yourselves to blame for letting them get away with it.
In the current political climate, the mere suggestion of legislation automatically means “legislate to hell”. That’s what we need – a religion centered around being against legislation of any kind.
Because the only options are no legislation, and legislating to hell.
How sad it is that people calling for sane legislation are attacked as wanting to “LEGISLATE EVERYTHING TO HELL”. People need to grow up and stop treating things in their extremes.
Then legislate with consultation. What is so difficult about doing that?
People with disabilities should be entitled. At least that’s what every society that wants fairness should aim for. Granted, some societies filled with stupid people don’t think society should be fair. Of course in that culture disabled people are not treated as equal and are seen as self-entitled. But that culture sucks and culture should be changed and dragged kicking and screaming into modernity.
Are you an idiot of do you just get off at the idea of legislation? We don’t need more fucking laws. With every specialized law we pass, we show we can’t earn and aren’t deserving of equality. Did you learn nothing from Apple? We don’t need lals, we need open-minded people and that is what laws will never give us. Education and understanding is the only way, not force from Big Brother.
[q]Are you an idiot of do you just get off at the idea of legislation?[q/]
Are you an idiot who chants “fuck legislation” every time someone mentions the word “legislation” without actually trying to understand what a person is trying to say?
It’s arseholes like you who have reactionary responses to the slightest thing who make it difficult to get anything done in society. It’s arseholes like you who turn democracies into two party oligarchies whose sole purpose is to oppose each other and take diametrically opposite positions because you’re too unimaginative to consider an alternative resolutions. It’s arseholes like you who let corporations off the hook because of the fear they’ll chuck a tantrum.
Can we hold this discussion without acting like 8 year olds and name-calling?
Thank you.
Thom, I don’t know whether we can agree on this, but I think some pseudo-anarchoid, extremely negative views on legislation as a whole are the only naive and childish concepts in this conversation.
Any time this comes up i am reminded of the difference that i ran into with the tech news from Europe vs from USA.
The tech news from Europe was overwhelmingly about helping people, with disabilities or otherwise, live a better life. Automated garbage cans and whatsnot.
The stuff out of USA was more about self-aggrandizement. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, all kinds of services and products for going “me me me!”.
Apple leading accessibility?!? SINCE WHEN!!!
Holy hannah. As someone with a slight vision impairment, and something of an accessibility advocate on the topic of web development, Apple’s hiding changing the system font size, piss poor support for it in applications, useless controls for screen reading and lack of good third party applications for same — at least on the desktop, has ALWAYS put them at the back of the pack on the accessibility front.
In terms of mobile devices, what I’ve seen isn’t much better. At least with Android interface scaling is right there in the settings, as is a whole host of other things that make iOS look about as accessibility friendly as a set of stairs.
NOT that touchscreens with no tactile feedback are the least bit ‘accessible’. Or as a friend of mine recently said about his newest smartphone “Oh for **** sake could you just give me a few damned buttons!”
Admittedly, he’s a RIM fan.
Apple should stick to what they do well, overpriced garbage for the effete elitists who wouldn’t know quality, value or effectiveness from the hole they’re pushing wood pegs into on their new Ikea bookshelf or the tailpipe on their Saab.
I agree, the font size issue and the new flat look is very detrimental for visually impaired users like us. I have a hard time seeing what is an interface element ant what is the content.
In case you don’t already know, try out the following options under General -> Accessibility, they might help:
Invert Colors
Larger Text
Bold Text
Button Shapes
Increase Contrast (3 options)
I manage a team that develops assistive technology and you’re just wrong. Accessibility support on iOS is far ahead of any other platform at the moment. Both visual access through VoiceOver, alternative access through switch control, guided access for cognitive disabilities, assistivetouch, zoom, and dozens of other options to make the interface more accessible for different users. If you’re talking about OS X there are also lots of excellent third party apps out there.
Never mind the apps available for things like AAC, many of which are still Apple only.
Clearly you have never seen how life changing access to a mobile device is for many people with all kinds of disabilities. iOS devices are huge in the blind community as well as for people with physical disabilities in a way that previous button-based devices never were.
Edited 2014-07-12 18:33 UTC
are we talking about the same apple that thought red, orange and green dots were a great idea in a world where about 9% of all men and 1 % of all women are red–green colorblind?
Edited 2014-07-10 22:43 UTC
Those coloured dots are always in the same position, in the same order. Also when you hover your mouse over them symbols appear.
They are the same colours as traffic lights. The same issue exists there. Red-green colourblind people tend to manage OK with them.
Some time ago Gnome and Sun were interested in this.
Sun were, but Oracle cut all funding to accessibility efforts once the acquisition was complete. Some of the GNOME crowd are still interested, however those are always coding against a moving upstream target. We do have somewhat decent access to GNOME and other GTK+-based environments and a bit to QT as well (has improved drastically with QT 5.0), but the constant flux means that what is working one day can be broken in a pinch with the next update without anyone realizing it before release.
All right. I don’t usually get involved in discussions like this, but I need to pipe up this time. This is a perspective on Apple’s accessibility efforts from the point of view of a totally blind person, namely myself. I do not intend this to be, and will not participate in, a platform X v platform Y debate. What I’m stating now are simply facts:
Apple’s accessibility efforts began in 2005 with the introduction of Voiceover and Zoom to OS X Tiger. At the time it was very limited, had few features that seemed outnumbered by the quirks, and crashed frequently. But you know what? It was built in to the operating system, it worked, and it meant that for the first time any blind person could look at or purchase a computer, turn it on, press a key (command+f5) and they’d have instant access. Maybe, if you have never had to deal with having no access without third-party utilities, you won’t understand what a big deal this still is. For the first time, we didn’t have to install anything. We didn’t have to purchase expensive products (screen readers ran anywhere from $795 to $1,295 for Windows machines). We were customers on equal footing with everyone else, but only where Macs were concerned. Still, it was a start and it was more than we had ever had before.
Did other platforms have built-in access? Sort of. Windows had Narrator, but that piece of crap was put in just to satisfy vague US accessibility legislation. It, at the time, couldn’t even read a web page in internet explorer (an ability it has only gained as of Windows 8 I might add). There were no free screen reading options for Windows at the time. I will repeat that, there were none. To get access to Windows, if we didn’t get someone else to pay for it, often cost us more than our actual computer did. GNOME was only just beginning to take an interest in this at that time, so what access we did have there was limited in the extreme though we had previously had no access whatsoever to anything running under *nix save for the text console.
Fast forward to 2009. The iPhone and iPod Touch have been out for a few years. WE still have no access to iPod Touches nor iPhones (though the speaking iPod Nano the previous year, as well as major updates to Voiceover and Zoom, showed us that Apple had not given up on accessibility. That is, until… Out came the iPhone 3GS and the iPod Touch 3rd generation, along with iOS 3.0. And what did iOS 3.0 have? Voiceover, for touch screens, at no extra cost. The situation on phones had, right up until then, been virtually the same as for computers. We had screen reader products for both Symbian and Windows Mobile, but they were just as expensive as the phone itself. Here comes Apple to change the game again. Now we’re on equal footing with cel phones too, at least with one brand. Just like with Mac, Voiceover was quirky at first on iOS, but Apple updated it and continues to update it to this day along with Mac OS X. Every iOS and Mac OS X update has brought Voiceover improvements not just in the screen reader, but in the APIs that support it at the core level.
Fast forward to today and the game has changed completely for us. Voiceover is on every product made by Apple with the exception of the iPod Classic which doesn’t have the computing power to support one no matter how small you try to make it. We’re about to have access to just about every major smartphone. We’ve had decent Android access since Jellybean 4.1, though Google does not take it as seriously as Apple does (a number of Google’s core apps still don’t read well with Talkback). Access to Android means that most Smart TVs are accessible now to one extent or another, and some more set top boxes too. Microsoft is beefing up Narrator (finally) and includes it in Windows Phone 8.1 for the first time. It can actually read web pages now. There is a free screen reader for Windows if you need something more powerful than Narrator, but only for X86/X64 PCs and Tablets due to the locked down nature of Windows Phone. Blackberry is readying their own screen reading solution and has it running on the Z10. Mozilla is doing the same for Firefox OS, though that’s still in early alpha. Looks like the only one we’re going to be left out of is Sailfish at this point.
Whether you love them or hate them, no matter what one thinks of Apple’s courtroom antics, they have been the biggest game changer in mainstream accessibility to come along in this past decade. We didn’t need legislation. We didn’t need charity. What we needed, and what Apple was willing to become, was a company that acknowledged us as customers and treated us as such. They knew that if they made accessible products we would buy them, and we did.
Was it good for Apple’s PR? Sure it was and why the hell not? But hey, it was even better for us as the customer. Understand this: I can walk up to any Apple product excepting the iPod classic, turn Voiceover on, and use it. In the Apple ecosystem at least, we are equal and at long last it’s starting to look like Apple’s example is being followed.
Nice, informative post. Thank you.
I think a lot of companies respond like this – the legislation is crucial because the only way to get the ball going is by forcing the hand of industry, but at the same time you see half-baked mediocre results because they end up doing “just enough”…
I have always thought a good way to get some new ideas in this area would be creating something like DARPA, but instead of having a focus on military technologies the focus is instead on accessibility technologies. Obviously we are not talking about the same kind of money, but you could probably fund a single grant program by earmarking a tiny amount of federal corporate tax revenue for this purpose (say like .001% – that is still something like 25 million).
Make it winner take all, the winning grant proposal gets the whole 25 million (probably minus a few million for operations and promotion).
I bet there are a lot of software engineers in Silicon Valley that would jump at the chance to apply their skills to something other than making their employers stock price go up, but almost all the government research money is tied to military tech…
25 million is peanuts – its like a rounding error in federal budget terms… But properly promoted and managed I bet you would see some proposals submitted. Would you rather make 20 million with yet another stupid mobile app startup or by solving real problems for disabled people? The industry cred for doing a winning proposal and building it to completion would be phenomenal.
But creating and funding a program like that requires legislation, and as His Holiness darknexus teaches us, all legislation is evil.
Well I don’t agree with that. My gripe is punitive legislation (meet these requirements or face consequences) for this kind of stuff is absolutely essential, but alone it isn’t enough. I think you need a carrot to go along with the stick…
Your post is interesting but your rant about legislation is a bit over the top. Narrator has nothing to do with legislagion, at all. There is no law that forces Microsoft Windows to be accessible to blind people.
Anyway it’s nice to see some accessibility effort from Apple, for free. It’s nice but it’s still a second thougth. Screen readers and voice controls are nice helpers but they are hacks on top of an operating system designed for seeing people. That’s because the blind people are a minority but large enough to have some hacks. People with motor disabilities for instance are not large enough for even that.
I have a dream of operating systems designed from the ground up for disabled people, one per disability category. Problem is that the demographics make this project far from sustainable financially. The big problem is the money. I think societies should be judged on how they treat their weakest members, and our financial focused society scores very low.
Well your right it doesn’t technically force them. But Section 508 of the US Rehabilitation Act means unless they included features like Narrator in Windows it would be ineligible for federal government use. They sell a lot of Windows licenses to the federal government…
http://www.section508.gov/section508-laws
On the other hand Apple sells hardly any Macs at all to the government. So you could make the argument that their investment in accessibility technology is much less financially oriented…
Edited 2014-07-11 10:24 UTC
Well neither Apple nor Microsoft are charities. I don’t blame either and their screen reader efforts are nice, whatever their motivations.
I was just dreaming about an operating system designed for the disabled. Something that does not rely on a screen and a pointing device, or a mere translation of those. Sadly this can not exist because it’s not financially sound.
I don’t know which one of Apple or Microsoft have the best technology for the disabled. Neither of them have anything close to being good in my opinion.
[q]Your post is interesting but your rant about legislation is a bit over the top. Narrator has nothing to do with legislagion, at all. There is no law that forces Microsoft Windows to be accessible to blind people./z’=
Actually, there is in this case. Because Windows is used in government institutions, section 508 of the US rehabilitation act applies. See http://www.section508.gov for more details, if interested.
Narrator would not comply with section 508 because blind people may also have hear loss. Windows complies because it is compatible with braille keyboards. Narrator is not necessary and not sufficient to comply with section 508.
Like you said, an OS and application ecosystem designed just for the blind or other disabilities is completely unsustainable. And it’s not even a good idea. Segregating people with disabilities to their own world is not the way forward. The way forward is making what we all use more accessible.
Not true. There is excellent support in iOS for people with motor impairments. Assistive touch and switch control.
Edited 2014-07-12 18:30 UTC
Designing an operating system for disabled people is not segregating against them, it’s the opposite. That’s like saying mouses designed for the left handed is segregation. Not designing mouses for left handed is segregation.
Now you can make the point that a mouse should be designed for both right handed and left handed but you will make a lesser mouse.
There is no such thing as a disabled man, it’s the situation that makes people disabled. When they have to use an operating system that is not designed for them they are disabled. That is segregation.
Designing for the disabled is not financially possible but it could be done with state funding. Unfortunately it won’t happen.
I’m going to assume you have never had to rely on access technology. If you had, you would never make such an idiotic statement. Consider this: how the hell would we be employable if we had our own operating system? We couldn’t run standard software which, if you haven’t noticed yet, is pretty damned vital if you actually want to co-exist. We’d have no real apps, and I don’t even want to think about what these special systems would cost. A left-handed mouse is the worst example you could’ve possibly used, because whether the mouse is left or right-handed doesn’t in any way affect what computers you can utilize it, nor what apps you can run. A completely separate operating system on the other hand… well, I hope I don’t have to explain it to you any further.
There is no such thing as standard software. There are standard file format, standard protocols but there is no standard software. Many people use OS X or GNU and are still employable. I have not used Microsoft Office in the last decade and still have a pretty successful life.
You don’t want to use “standard” software when you are disabled. I don’t know if you have already tried to use skype with a single switch. It works, but let me tell you that is sucks, big time. It’s an endless sequence of wait and click for selecting menu items and widgets and browsing throw contacts. It takes forever just to select a contact. It really sucks, trust me. Replace skype with a custom instant messaging app designed for motor disabled people, make an UI based on something like dasher for selecting contacts, sort the menus in a way that make sense for switch activation, etc… Now that would be an app that is 100 times more useful for motor disabled people. Who cares if it’s not the same app as everybody else if it’s compatible at the protocol level? You don’t want to use Skype, you want to communicate with people using Skype.
Edited 2014-07-13 12:46 UTC
On iOS/OSX development of such features is easy to include because of rich set of Frameworks which do work and are integrated into core OS. Gnome and Qt accessibility APIs are also not very hard to use.
On Windows – I don’t want to look at this crap anymore. As usual – poor documentation consisting of crappy COM interfaces with no information how to use them in the app whatsoever. Why the hell should I search whole MSDN while others provide inline code examples.
Symbian on the other hand was collection of half-assed, buggy, mediocre utility classes, most of which doesn’t work at all or crash the application or whole OS. Frameworks (in the sense of Apple or Android way don’t exist there). If these bozos couldn’t provide coherent UI framework, I’m not suprised they couldn’t even handle any modern features.
Edited 2014-07-11 17:05 UTC
But how does a blind person use a touchscreen device?
(In the late nineties, I actually heard of a blind person who used Linux since a Braille terminal and Lynx was the best way to get on the web back then. I don’t think that would work well these days.)
By changing the device’s gesture set slightly so that the act of touching an item has the device speak the item (or Braille it if you have a compatible refreshable Braille device) rather than activating the item. To activate, you tap twice. This is the universal way of doing this now, rather than special overlays that were the case pre-Apple. For touch keyboards on these devices there are two ways it can work, either the previous double-tap method or have the key activate once your finger lifts. The iPhone has both modes, but Android was the first to have the latter option which I much prefer. There are other gestures as well to review text by character, word, etc but these differ based on which operating system you are using. There are also gestures to navigate around by items in case one has a problem locating items on the screen directly, as well as a pssthrough gesture that will allow the direct sending of a gesture that would otherwise be used by the screen reader to be passed through to where you are touching (some poorly-coded apps read the gesture rather than standard events and thus need this workaround).
You’d be correct there. None of the text-based browsers have kept up with modern web standards and certainly are not reasonable options for us anymore. However we’ve got access to Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Internet Explorer. Most other browsers based on these engines will read fine as well, though which engines are accessible and to what degree varies from platform to platform. For example, on Apple platforms the WEbkit-based browsers such as Chrome or Safari will give us the best access, while on Windows, GNOME, and Android you want to go with Firefox if possible, and IE if you can’t install Firefox. Webkit’s accessibility is iffy on Android and in GNOME, which presents problems for applications that use their own HTML view controls since everything accept Windows has moved to Webkit these days. Not a problem on Mac or iOS, since Apple’s done a crap ton of work on making sure Webkit and Voiceover communicate properly. Built-in Trident HTML views work well on Windows as well, though don’t convey as much information as Gecko-based views do.
Thanks. Great answer.