this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2024
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Why are MacOS / IOS apps becoming less accessible to low vision users? (lemmy.ml)
submitted 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) by feoh@lemmy.ml to c/mac@lemmy.ml
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I've noticed in recent years that more and more apps only offer "small, medium, large" font size settings. My problem is simple. I am visually impaired and need VERY large fonts.

I need my font size set like this:

https://share.icloud.com/photos/08bSDwyyJZm2X4g1f9iZ6mreA

But instead, with more and more apps like Ivory for example, the biggest I can get is this:

https://share.icloud.com/photos/00eUunqHWyZkEWCuFpHlPmVEA

I suspect that the culprit may be Swift UI, but I have no evidence for this.

Does anyone understand the reasoning behind this trend, and is there any possible fix for end users other than begging application developers to have pity? :)

Thanks!

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[–] hydroptic@sopuli.xyz 6 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

Does anyone understand the reasoning behind this trend, and is there any possible fix for end users other than begging application developers to have pity? :)

The reasoning is that too many developers and execs don't give a flying fuck about accessibility features, and many will even outright balk at the suggestion of using time and money to develop them at the cost of "paying" features, and many developers don't even know how to write accessible UIs. When I was a CTO I had the CEO berate me for wanting to pay more attention to accessibility; it would have cost money and since none of our customers actually requested accessibility features it would have been useless, according to them. Our incompetent fuck of a frontend dev also didn't know the first thing about accessibility, and thought that learning about it would have been a waste of their time.

I'm somewhat visually impaired too, and on macOS I've just started using the "hover text" feature that you can find under "Zoom" in the accessibility settings, where if you hold down the option key you'll see a popup that shows a text description of whatever UI element you're pointing at (or eg. a description if it's an icon button). Unfortunately it doesn't work with all apps and all UI elements because, again, devs would need to put in some work too. In many cases I'll just have to use the zoom feature to make sense of some smaller UI items.

I'm not sure there's much to be done except to beg for pity, and based on my previous experience both using and producing apps, the likelihood of success is pretty slim. Always worth it to ask devs for accessibility features, but don't get your hopes up.

[–] feoh@lemmy.ml 2 points 8 months ago

I use the hover text too for discerning the name/nature of UI elements but when it comes to, say, being able to actually read my Fediverse stream in Ivory, that doesn't help much :)

And sure, i can use the full screen zoom feature, which is great, but then I'm trapped in zoomed box purgatory, constantly swooshing my tiny zoomed space around the larger screen.

It's miserable, and all because they've taken away one of the very features that drew me to Mac/IOS/Apple to begin with :(

[–] Libb@jlai.lu 2 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

The reasoning is that too many developers and execs don’t give a flying fuck about accessibility features

A bit late to the party but 100% this.

One of the reasons why I've slowly started switching toward Linux, after 35 years being an Apple customer myself, is that I find Linux much more comfortable to use: being 50+ and not having the best eyesight I appreciate being allowed to make the text as big as I need it to be so I can f*cking read it, no matter what some constipated designer decided in their office somewhere at Cupertino.

I like Apple, I won't deny it and I would probably never have even considered using Linux instead of Apple products if it was not for the way they made their design so user-unfriendly. That, and the lack of repairability/upgradability, aka the lack of ownership on our hardware.

[–] hydroptic@sopuli.xyz 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I think this current Macbook is probably going to be my last Apple machine. I've been using both Macs and various Linux and BSD setups for the past ~25 years and I've appreciated having a low-friction, low-hassle UNIX OS with great UX. I've been exclusively running macOS for a few years now, and with each successive macOS version I just feel more and more that not only does the quality go down (even the fucking main development language, Swift, is buggy and poorly planned), but I also have less and less control over what's actually running on my machine. For example, even if you toggle Siri off it'll still do something with your data (fuck knows what) and actually disabling it requires first disabling SIP, and there's also seemingly no way to opt out of Apple's frankly creepy "trial" system which nobody really knows much about in the first place – they're apparently running some sort of ML-related experiments on users via triald, but good fucking luck finding out much more than that.

Even the accessibility situation is deteriorating, especially for accessibility clients (so things like screen readers etc) – the API is ancient, extremely poorly documented, and a huge pain in the ass to actually use from Swift. And don't get me started on the terrible state of Apple's developer documentation in general…

[–] Libb@jlai.lu 2 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

I think this current Macbook is probably going to be my last Apple machine.

We're in the same boat. I can't say I'm happy with that but I know I also like using Linux or I should say the GNU/Linux system as I'm also more and more appreciative of the philosophical part that GNU promotes.

The low-friction you mention is probably one the thing most non-Apple users don't get as, when it works (which is not always the case but often is), a Mac is like butter smooth and help so much getting things done. Linux is not there yet but when I started considered and testing it I was was surprised how usable it was already and, at least, in exchange of that tad more of frictions we do get back that control we have lost to Apple. And that's a compromise I willing to live with — and so are my older eyes that can't read ant-sized texts anymore ;)

Even the accessibility situation is deteriorating,

It never was great, imho. For some time, I even considered using Windows in place of macOS (since it worked better to make text larger), I even invested in one of Microsoft laptop but I ended up giving it away as I just could not stand all the incoherence within Windows itself (it is such a sad state of affair). Also, I'm not a fan of their telemetry.

The one issue I have not decided on so far, in regard to a full switch, is the phone. I can't stand Google, therefore it doesn't matter how open it is, and I'd rather use harder for as many years as I can (trying to generate as little e-waste as I can) so android looks like a no go for me. I imagine I will probably keep using a dumbed down iPhone, like I have been doing for the last few years, in order to access the very few apps I have to use, IDs, banks and stuff like that...

[–] hydroptic@sopuli.xyz 1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

The low-friction you mention is probably one the thing most non-Apple users don't get as, when it works (which is not always the case but often is), a Mac is like butter smooth and help so much getting things done. Linux is not there yet but when I started considered and testing it I was was surprised how usable it was already and, at least, in exchange of that tad more of frictions we do get back that control we have lost to Apple. And that's a compromise I willing to live with — and so are my older eyes that can't read ant-sized texts anymore ;)

Yeah, even though the older I get the more I appreciate how macOS for the most part "just works" while still being a UN*X system at heart, I'm just so fed up with how each release is more opaque and less documented than the last, with more services that collect your data and send it to Apple even if you opt out. Also, because fixing bugs and incremental development isn't sexy and marketing needs something cool, each OS release comes with an oodle of half-finished and buggy whizz-bang features that ultimately never really get polished, and end up sort of quietly abandoned and left to gather dust once Apple's dev teams move on to working on the big OS release's whizz-bangs, which often sort of overlap with previous whizz-bangs without actually leveraging them. So for example, instead of incremental improvements to Spaces and Mission Control – the two window management systems we already had – we got Stage Manager which initially didn't even work with Spaces, and which nobody seems to have found a good use for yet, all the while multimonitor support somehow manages to get worse with every release, color calibration support was completely fucked much to the chagrin of visual arts folks, that audio balance drift bug is 10 years old, visual accessibility's gotten worse, and so on and so on.

It never was great, imho. For some time, I even considered using Windows in place of macOS (since it worked better to make text larger), I even invested in one of Microsoft laptop but I ended up giving it away as I just could not stand all the incoherence within Windows itself (it is such a sad state of affair). Also, I’m not a fan of their telemetry.

The one issue I have not decided on so far, in regard to a full switch, is the phone.

Hah, yeah, as much as I gripe about problems with macOS and Apple's data collection habits or the occasional jank in Linux, using Windows feels so painful and intrusive that it should probably be covered under the Geneva Conventions, although part of that definitely just comes from the fact that I haven't owned a Windows system since Win8 was a thing so my Windows encounters are pretty sporadic. It's honestly surprising that the accessibility story is actually better in Windows, I really wasn't expecting that.

I'm in the same boat as far as phones go. Android's UX somehow manages to irritate the everliving fuck out of me, so even a "degoogled" Android version is a non-starter for me, but there aren't too many choices out there anymore (yay consolidation.) Sailfish OS is one that springs to mind, but as a project it feels more undead than really alive, and it's closed source too.

[–] Libb@jlai.lu 1 points 2 weeks ago

but as a project it feels more undead than really alive

:)

and it’s closed source too.

Then it's a no go for me. I mean, since it's closed source I'd rather keep using my iPhone which works great and let me access every single one of the few ads I do need.

[–] hydroptic@sopuli.xyz 3 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

Oh yeah, and I just realized I've been a dum idjit and completely forgotten to mention the slightly hacky way you can enlarge some UI fonts that might help y'all @feoh@lemmy.ml & @Libb@jlai.lu.

You may be familiar with this already, but by editing some system preference keys "manually", you can crank up the default font sizes that apps, the OS, and some native UI elements use beyond what System Settings lets you do – both allowing for bigger font sizes in apps and the OS itself (but which can lead to UI bugs), and allowing changing eg. label or tooltip font sizes separately. This can only work for native apps, but even then sometimes it only sort of works at best and especially SwiftUI seems to just completely ignore these (because of course it fucking does).

You can either use Tinkertool which also allows you to export and import the current state of all the configs that Tinkertool manages, and that's pretty handy when you're fiddling with your configs. It does eg. limit the system font size to max 24 for whatever reason though, so if you want to go over that limit you can hop in the Terminal and use defaults to add/change the preferences:

(All of these take an int value)

  • NSFixedPitchFontSize
  • NSSystemFontSize
  • NSMessageFontSize
  • NSLabelFontSize
  • NSToolTipsFontSize
  • NSTitleBarFontSize
  • NSPaletteFontSize

So for example to set the system font size to 15, you'd use defaults write -g NSSystemFontSize -int 15
If you want to restore the default value I think it's enough to just delete the key(s) you've changed: eg. defaults delete -g NSSystemFontSize.

Caveat emptor, though: this is of course completely unsupported and you'll probably run into UI funk depending on which sizes you change and by how much. For example NSLabelFontSize defaults to 10, and I've increased it to 12 which mostly works but some labels can get truncated if the label's container doesn't scale with the label font size which many apps assume will never change. It's definitely not an ideal solution or even a good one by any means because UIs do kinda start borking once you change these too much, but might be worth a shot anyhow?

[–] Libb@jlai.lu 1 points 2 weeks ago

Thx for that tip, I will check that as soon as I can, as well as Tinkertool. This may help & it doesn't matter (to me at least) the few issues that may or may not arise by doing that, as long as it makes things more readable to my old eyes ;)