Tuesday, February 9, 2016

El Capitan and tvOS Criticized by Vestibular Disorder Sufferer

Craig Grannell:

iOS at least helped users, in providing a Reduce Motion option in the Accessibility section within Settings. Within six months, most of the worst animations were possible to replace with non-aggressive crossfades, much to the relief of vestibular disorder sufferers worldwide. But we’ve seen no such progress on OS X, and tvOS recently appeared with a ‘Reduce Motion’ setting so ineffective that it may as well have played a little sniggering noise when activated.

[…]

El Capitan kills the one remaining workaround I had that enabled me to safely use full-screen apps. System Integrity Protection, while essential to the security of the Mac, more or less kills off applications that inject code into OS X. TotalSpaces2 is one of them. The app was designed to manage desktops in a manner akin to those in OS X 10.6, but, importantly, included settings to customise transitions.

Via Adam C. Engst:

Although it’s impossible to know what percent of the population suffers from vestibular disorders, estimates range from 5 to 35 percent, meaning that there could be many millions of people out there who endure some level of discomfort due to unnecessary animations and effects. We’d like to see Apple extend its accessibility work in iOS to its other operating systems (including watchOS, which Grannell doesn’t discuss).

I don’t have a vestibular disorder, but I use Reduce Motion and Reduce Transparency wherever possible.

4 Comments RSS · Twitter

Henry Maddocks

Id just like things to stop moving when when I click them. Who the hell thought that was a good idea?

Plus Increase Contrast … :)

@Martin Yes, Increase Contrast is great on the Mac. I actually stopped using Increase Contrast > Reduce Transparency on iOS because of some drawing glitches/ugliness.

Scott Steinman

Having both vestibular problems and chronic migraines (which can worsen with visual or body motion), I fully empathize with Craig Grinnell. I also had to turn on Reduce Motion on iOS. I haven't noticed as much of a problem with El Capitan, though.

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