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Apple announces new accessibility features, including eye tracking

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Re: Apple announces new accessibility features, including eye tracking

#151

Post by contravariant »

jiggawatts wrote: post #135
yreg wrote: post #126

Accessibility is for everyone, including you, if you live long enough. And the alternative is worse. So your choice is death or you are going to use accessibility features. – Siracusa

I aimed for the upvote button but they’re so tiny that my fat finger hit the downvote button by accident and then I had to retry the action. This is what people mean by accessibility is for everyone all of the time.

I've hidden and reported so many posts on the front page.

I can only hope that the algorithms take into account that there's a decent chance someone trying to hit a link or access the comments will accidentally report a post instead.

Re: Apple announces new accessibility features, including eye tracking

#152

Post by avtar »

datahack wrote: post #147
pseudosavant wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a tremor and I run into this issue on HN all the time. I need to zoom in a lot to be sure I'll hit it.

I don’t (yet) have accessibility challenges beyond glasses but hitting the tiny arrows is incredibly difficult. How come HN doesn’t update to be more accessible? It’s been a long time… I’m surprised it hasn’t been talked about by the team there.

As someone who has carried out accessibility audits, I can unfortunately attest to this topic being a blindspot in tech circles. I remember hanging out with fairly senior frontend devs from a FAANG company who didn't know what purpose skip links served on websites. It can also be an uphill battle to advocate for remediation once design and development work is already baked in.

Re: Apple announces new accessibility features, including eye tracking

#154

Post by notJim »

yreg wrote: post #126

Accessibility is for everyone, including you, if you live long enough. And the alternative is worse. So your choice is death or you are going to use accessibility features. – Siracusa

See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curb_cut_effect

Re: Apple announces new accessibility features, including eye tracking

#155

Post by furyofantares »

contravariant wrote: post #151
jiggawatts wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I aimed for the upvote button but they’re so tiny that my fat finger hit the downvote button by accident and then I had to retry the action. This is what people mean by accessibility is for everyone all of the time.

I've hidden and reported so many posts on the front page. I can only hope that the algorithms take into account that there's a decent chance someone trying to hit a link or access the comments will accidentally report a post instead.

Every once in a while I wonder where a post disappeared to. Eventually I worked out I was accidentally hiding them, found dozens of hidden posts I was interested in when I looked at my profile.

I still do it all the time. It's a problem on both desktop and mobile. I've send mail about it to dang before and did get a response, definitely a known issue.

Re: Apple announces new accessibility features, including eye tracking

#156

Post by happyopossum »

hbn wrote: post #108
ljm wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't love that solid UX gets pushed under the accessibility rug, as an option you might never find. 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.

The iPhone has a hidden accessibility setting where you can map and double and/or triple tap of the back of your phone to a handful of actions. I use this to trigger Reachability (the feature that brings the entire UI halfway down the screen so you can reach buttons at the top) because phone screens are so damn big that I can't reach the opposite top corner with my thumb even on my 13 mini without hand gymnastics. An…

>The iPhone has a hidden accessibility setting

This isn’t “hidden”. It was even called out and demonstrated in the iOS 14 keynote.

Re: Apple announces new accessibility features, including eye tracking

#157

Post by happyopossum »

Tagbert wrote: post #30
snoman wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every attention thief is absolutely thrilled at the idea of tracking your eyes. Let’s all imagine the day where the YouTube free tier pauses ads when you’re not actively looking at them. Shit. I’m turning into one of those negative downers. I’m sorry. I’ve had too much internet today.

If this is at all like the eye tracking in Vision Pro, it is only available to the OS and apps are not given access to the data.

Until the EU comes in and forces them to ‘open up’ the functionality in the name of ‘fairness’…

Re: Apple announces new accessibility features, including eye tracking

#158

Post by dgfitz »

ipqk wrote: post #149
datahack wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t (yet) have accessibility challenges beyond glasses but hitting the tiny arrows is incredibly difficult. How come HN doesn’t update to be more accessible? It’s been a long time… I’m surprised it hasn’t been talked about by the team there.

Do you think Paul Graham or Garry Tan give a shit about accessibility?

No.

Re: Apple announces new accessibility features, including eye tracking

#159

Post by square_usual »

hbn wrote: post #108
ljm wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't love that solid UX gets pushed under the accessibility rug, as an option you might never find. 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.

The iPhone has a hidden accessibility setting where you can map and double and/or triple tap of the back of your phone to a handful of actions. I use this to trigger Reachability (the feature that brings the entire UI halfway down the screen so you can reach buttons at the top) because phone screens are so damn big that I can't reach the opposite top corner with my thumb even on my 13 mini without hand gymnastics. An…

Unironically calling this feature "hidden" is why things are the way they are now. It's not hidden! You can find it if you go through the settings app! But because it isn't in your face all day every now and then people will talk about this "super secret feature" and then a PM somewhere has to make a nag feature to advertise it.

Re: Apple announces new accessibility features, including eye tracking

#160

Post by hanniabu »

xnx wrote: post #9

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.

Accessibility features can be used to steal attention too
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