[NFBCS] IOS 17 rolling out tomorrow

[Nancy Coffman]

Part of the problem is that the Apple accessibility team doesn't include enough users who would notice the bugs and be bothered by them. One of the accessibility challenges Apple has blatantly refused to address is the navigation issues with Braille. With some displays, you still cannot insert a line without extra keystrokes. Is it time for us to resolve that they need to hire blind software engineers and testers to make sure their products work?


Nancy Coffman



Nancy Coffman

> On Sep 19, 2023, at 8:25 PM, Brian Buhrow via NFBCS <nfbcs at nfbnet.org> wrote:
> 
>     Hello.  I suspect the problem with these bugs is not that there isn't time to fix them,
> but rather, Apple isn't able to reproduce them.  For example, there is a long standing bug in
> iOS, since iOS 10 at least, whereby if one is playing an mp3 media file in Safari, one is not
> able to move the playback slider by more than 5 or 10 seconds in either direction at a time;
> yet that slider works perfectly fine if operated without VoiceOver.  When I opened a ticket
> with Apple Accessibility, they said they couldn't reproduce the problem, even when I provided
> videos showing them how to reproduce it.  The challenge is that, in my view, most folks,
> including those people who develop them, don't know how to troubleshoot nonvisual access issues
> because, as I say, even though they develop the tools, they don't use them regularly and don't
> rely on them for their daily experience.  Many of these bugs are subttle and, unless you're
> intimately familiar with the access technology, because you use it, you're going to miss the
> bug when it occurs unless it's painfully obvious.  
>    In short, it's not a time problem, but a resourcing issue in general.  And, no matter how
> long one delays a software release, if access technology isn't given enough resources relative
> to the project as a whole, the issues will never be addressed.
> 
> -thanks
> -Brian
> 
> _______________________________________________
> NFBCS mailing list
> NFBCS at nfbnet.org
> http://nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nfbcs_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for NFBCS:
> http://nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nfbcs_nfbnet.org/nancy.l.coffman%40gmail.com