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All things mac and macOS @lemmy.ml feoh @lemmy.ml

Why are MacOS / IOS apps becoming less accessible to low vision users?

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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9 comments

  • 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.

    • 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 :(

    • 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.

      • 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…

  • 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?

    • 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 ;)

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