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The iPad was meant to revolutionize accessibility
31–40 of 83 posts
Re: The iPad was meant to revolutionize accessibility
#32I’m not sure if the author is aware of the Apple Vision announcement, but that will be a giant leap forward for the disabled since it primarily relies on eye tracking for interaction.
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
Re: The iPad was meant to revolutionize accessibility
#33This is the easiest answer ever: It's not meaningfully "free/open source."
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.
Re: The iPad was meant to revolutionize accessibility
#34as far as i know there have been improvements? not sure what kind of "revolution" the author wanted but having a medium-form-factor portable computer with the power to do stuff like writing recognition (well) and speech synthesis is pretty helpful
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.
Re: The iPad was meant to revolutionize accessibility
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
My father is 84 with cognitive degeneration. He’s used an iPhone for years but is stuck on an old one with the home button purely because we don’t think he’ll transition to swiping up. His short term memory is shot, learning new behaviors is tough, and his fine motor skills aren’t great. Some of the adaptive settings help, but the home button is so easy. Could someone not build the case you mention (shock, spill proo…
> He’s used an iPhone for years but is stuck on an old one with the home button purely because we don’t think he’ll transition to swiping up. 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.
I switched my mother, who also has cognitive decline, from the iPhone 7 to the iPhone SE to keep the same shape and the home button. She was never able to master the upward swipe on her new iPad.
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”.
Re: The iPad was meant to revolutionize accessibility
#36I develop iPad accessibility software for people who have dementia, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, MS, etc. The iPad is a godsend. The large screen couples well with easy-grip shock-resistant spill-proof cases and attachments. 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-visib…
Zero-visibility interfaces are a challenge even for me.
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.
Re: The iPad was meant to revolutionize accessibility
#37I develop iPad accessibility software for people who have dementia, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, MS, etc. The iPad is a godsend. The large screen couples well with easy-grip shock-resistant spill-proof cases and attachments. 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-visib…
I think Assistive Access in iOS 17 would fit the bill for the simplified patient UI. https://medium.com/the-useful-tech/apples-new-accessibility-...
This. Apps can declare support for Assistive Access by adding UISupportsFullScreenInAssistiveAccess = YES to their Info.plist:
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/bundleresources/in...
There isn't any other way to further integrate into the feature though.
Re: The iPad was meant to revolutionize accessibility
#38This is the easiest answer ever: It's not meaningfully "free/open source." 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.
Then why aren’t there solutions that fit their bill on Android or open source platforms like Linux?
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.
Re: The iPad was meant to revolutionize accessibility
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
Again, these ideals don't have to be mutually exclusive. Apple has made successful and secure platforms before with both an App Store and an external packaging system - they just don't bring that philosophy to the iPhone for profitability reasons. 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 tod…
> 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. 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 instal…
That would be a more fair criticism if Apple charged the game publishers fair fees commensurate with the cost of security audits, bandwidth, availability, and the like. Instead, Apple (and other app stores) tend to demand massive profit sharing.
Re: The iPad was meant to revolutionize accessibility
#40I’m not sure if the author is aware of the Apple Vision announcement, but that will be a giant leap forward for the disabled since it primarily relies on eye tracking for interaction. 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…
It uses hand tracking too. And if you are using hand tracking you might as well use a touch screen.