Monday, October 26, 2015

The Best Underutilized and Poorly Implemented Accessibility Feature

Scott Gruby:

iOS 7 brought a feature called dynamic type which moves away from developers specifying exact point sizes for text and instead uses a number of descriptions for fonts.

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The next example is in Calendar. This one is worse than the first because the row is a fixed height and it looks like each row of text is also a fixed height so that when a larger font is used, it looks awful.

For a company that pays so much attention to accessibility, these examples show that individual teams making the apps aren’t doing enough to look at their apps. Maybe all the engineers have great eyes and can see the text, but this does need to get fixed.

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There is more to this issue. For one, it show just how many engineers are under 30 and simply don't take older eyes into consideration. This commend field is a good example. I have a 24" monitor. So why do I have to squint to see 11 point font?

Furthermore, there are a number of features that used to be just user preferences that have now been labeled as "accessibility" and moved deep into accessibility settings. Does accessibility really have anything to do with it? Or is it just a way to market retina displays which can display 4 point font and force touch devices that don't require those of us with joint problems (>30 geezers) to use 3-finger drag.

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