It is ideal for the elderly or those with cognitive disabilities. It removes almost every complex feature and reduces the rest to large clearly labelled buttons. And it doesn't take that long to enable.
Earlier this year I set an iPad up for my elderly dad - it was going to be used for podcasts and YouTube, only - and it looked like it was going to be ideal. "What a great feature," I thought!
Except... There is no way to turn off screen rotation. None. It can't be done in the Assistive Access menu, and doesn't respect the setting in normal mode. It just always rotates. I spent an hour on the phone with Apple Support, and there's nothing to be done about it.
My dad couldn't deal with his icons rotating around on the screen, nor not being able to watch videos while lying down. It gathered dust.
I think this comment is the essence of this post and the general sentiment. They make software the user is scared to interact with. This is backwards Apple. They just need to do the opposite of what they're doing and they nail it.
> They make software the user is scared to interact with.
Apple isn't unique here either. This is a sentiment across nearly all OSes, on mobile and on desktop.
It's one of the primary sources of help desk tickets where I work (I'm IT manager, grew up doing helpdesk->sysadmin). People are afraid to even try some basic troubleshooting, afraid to click on dialog boxes, afraid to mess with settings. Even auto-save in Office freaks people out, they are afraid to close their documents because that Ctrl+S feedback loop is gone, and autosave is ambiguous. Is it instant? How do I know it's saved the change I just made? So now there's users that need to go and double check the modified timestamp on the file before closing the document.
I get downvoted and called old every time I say this but Win 95/98 was peak UX. We are chasing aesthetics now instead of actual usability design. Marketing got too involved in how things looked, everything needs to be a customized, branded "experience" and it's causing severe learning curves vs. just following OS conventions and widgets where every app more or less looked and operated the same way.
Where's all the UX designers and researchers? Oh right, we've laid them all off or just spent too many years not listening to what they had to say and letting the rent seeking marketing and accounting folks drive the products.
It's because we've pushed and pushed so much for simplicity and dumbing things down that we've obliterated any semblance of confidence.
When Windows puts up an error message like 'oopsy doospy window's made a fucky wucky!" I don't feel safe! I don't trust this magic box!
Modern software will just lie straight to your face and hide things from you. Like the autosave thing. People don't trust it because it lies. The saving stuff is hidden away, and if it says 'saved', it might not be!
Which, great, fantastic, amazing - when it works. When it doesn't, we don't get any feedback. Things just start magically breaking. Things become unpredictable. And that's scary. We lose confidence in the system.
Like, imagine you have a car with lane keep assist. Lane keep assist makes mistakes, sure. But it beeps, it says "hey we're doing this", and you can trivially override it.
Imagine it didn't do that. Imagine it didn't beep, maybe you didn't even know about the system. Imagine you can't turn it off, or imagine you can't override it. You're just driving one day... and then the car is veering off the road. You push the steering wheel to the right, but it keeps going to the left. How much confidence would you have in that car? Would you get in it again?
A lot of them are still working at these tech companies, gazing at their navels and worrying more about how dynamic their artistic portfolio is, than how their users are actually using their designs.
> Where's all the UX designers and researchers? Oh right, we've laid them all off or just spent too many years not listening to what they had to say and letting the rent seeking marketing and accounting folks drive the products.
I think this is too generous to UX designers. They still exist and are very much involved in shipping unusable trash. I have been through multiple UX design reviews as a user and every time the UX designers are flabbergasted when I show them how their product is actually used. They never have any concept of a real user doing a thing. It’s a widespread cultural failure in the discipline.
I had the same worry but after pressing "next" like 15 times and waiting for 15 pages to load, the last page of Apple's documentation on Assistive Access tells you that you can exit it by triple clicking the "side button" (pointing to the power button, so not the side volume buttons I guess but idk). I went ahead after that and while it needed a few more presses, it ended up working that way, so you can enter and exit at will (at least, once you managed to enter; see my other comment for issues on that front...)
I asked the same question of the Apple Tier 3 Support person with whom I eventually spoke. Tier 1 and 2 were sympathetic, and as surprised as I was by this behavior, and ran me through various series of convoluted setting changes, none of which worked.
[Edit: If I recall correctly, we even set it up again from scratch, to try out an idea the Tier 2 guy had. Tier 1 and 2 really were excellent to work with, despite their inability to solve the problem. Both knew the system well, weren't following scripts, and were able to think outside the box and try creative solutions. It was my first experience with Apple Support, and Gold Stars: would call again.]
Tier 3 was brusque, and acted like I was the first person who'd ever raised the topic (which, given the previous surprise, maybe I was). I explained that my dad was bedridden, and wanted to watch YouTube videos without the damn screen spinning around on him, and recall a palpable lack of sympathy. I didn't get an answer as to whether it's a bug or not, and I'm pretty sure the ticket died at Tier 3, so I doubt anyone knowledgeable will ever know about it.
In Assistive Access mode? What version are you on?
My dad passed in the spring, so it's moot for me, but I'd be glad to know that they've fixed it for other people.
[Edit: someone else in this thread said it's still bugged in 18.6.2, so if you've got a working build it'll be particularly helpful to know which it is. Maybe even for Apple - I maintain a fond delusion that folks who matter still read this board.]
Sorry, I may not have explained the problem well. Yes, in AA mode, the screen is always unlocked, regardless of any device settings you may otherwise, er, set.
> The phones are too fiddly now, and pressing random things as they try to hold the phone meant the phone got lost in a sea of opening stuff up. So, I tried the assistive access, but why isn’t this an option from the get-go? It asks you the age of setup; why not have a 65+ or something for a senior mode?
> why not have a 65+ or something for a senior mode?
Damn... I'm guessing OP is pretty young or something. I know people 80+ who have hardly any problems with regular iOS. I also know people under 60 who do. Age isn't a great thing to assume ability from.
I need to remember that I don't represent the norm, when it comes to stuff like that.
I guess the saddest thing (to me), is seeing people that consider learning to be a pain point. Even young folks don't want to learn. Us geeks aren't exactly representative of the vast majority of folks. That often makes it difficult for us to design stuff for them.
Dam' right (he says, still developing at 70). Getting older may be compulsory, but I regularly have to help the youngsters out with tech-related matters.
Maybe it's the best compromise, but there's something sad about Apple essentially making an entire second set of apps because they couldn't make the main ones accessible enough. It's like siloing people off into their own universe instead of making this one comfortable for them.
I can’t speak to whether it’s the _best_ compromise but if you see a screenshot of the way they dumb down the Camera app I think it does make it more clear that for example perhaps not a single reader of this website would ever find it remotely acceptable.
Like no video if I recall correctly. I mean I’m sure with infinite time someone would find a better compromise.
Yes, and hitting a nail is very hairy from a safety perspective. That doesn't mean there should be 1 single blessed company with a license to carpentry.
Triple tap with three fingers to zoom in and zoom out. While you're zoomed, drag with three fingers to pan the view.
But I also kinda feel like just saying that says a lot about Apple's UX these days, especially in the accessibility department. Because those swipe gestures can be confusing and require too much manual dexterity for many people who need a feature like screen magnification.
Re the other reply here, what's missing is discoverability -- at minimum a little circled letter "i" in the corner that would pop up a big sketch of the required gesture.
Discoverability is important, but elderly people are unlikely to be able to reliably (or at all) triple-tap with three fingers, regardless of discoverability. Many already have problems with double-pressing buttons (like for Apple Pay).
I just tried going through the setup on a friend's work phone to try it out because it looked useful for my grandpa (he currently has a dumbphone due to eyesight issues, can't really use a touchscreen, but maybe this mode might work with big enough buttons and TTS)
Issues:
1. It says "no results" if you look for "assi" in the settings. I wondered if this phone model doesn't support it, but ended up finding it manually near the bottom of the accessibility settings
2. The setup process is confusing, asking questions we don't know. E.g. need to confirm we know the "passcode" without saying what that is or having a field to try it out on. Does it mean lockscreen PIN? Then sure. We just pressed continue and hoped for the best. It also asks whether apps, that have been on the phone since forever, suddenly need a bunch of permissions. Will this mess with the friend's old settings outside of this special mode? We have no idea what was set and what to pick, e.g. does WhatsApp need contact access to work? Speech recognition? One of them even says "this is unexpected, please report this" How? Where? To what end?
3. Eventually got to the last screen and pressed the button for "Ok, we're ready now, enable!" and it pops up an error message: can't enable with the SIM PIN active, disable this in "settings" (ok which settings, where? Why not link it?)
4. Thankfully, this time we can find that in settings' search and... it's already disabled. I go back to assistive access and the error persists
I literally can't get this set up...
Edit: wanted to show the friend whose work phone this is the silliness of an error that says X and another screen saying the opposite. Now the SIM PIN shows up as enabled! So I pressed disable, they entered the PIN, and it gave another error message. But upon closing the screen, it showed as disabled again. Hoping it was real this time, went back to assistive access and now it could be enabled!
Turns out... assistive access only works for the standard apps: Phone/dialer, SMS, camera, gallery, magnifier
You can enable e.g. Google Maps but it has no idea that you're in assistive mode and shows you the normal UI. It also tells you to go and enable location access in settings, which you can't do in this mode. (I had enabled precise location during the setup of assistive access, but apparently it's broken.)
This does have TTS for the SMS messages, that's nice, but he'd not be able to answer them and have a conversation anyway
The magnifier is too jittery to be useful (his dumbphone has the same feature and issue)
Going back out of assistive access mode, it seems the new app permission levels persisted outside this mode and some things are messed up now (whatsapp complaining it is missing access, for example)
TL;DR same functionality as the 60€ dumbphone / flip phone my grandpa has, except (pro) you also get SMS TTS, (con) it's all non-tactile buttons, and (con) you can't flip the phone open to unlock the screen or accept a call. Especially that last one turned out to be really easy for the two grandparents that can't use a smartphone (one with visual, one with mental impairments). I'd recommend saving 500€ and going for the more accessible option instead
> assistive access only works for the standard apps
Other apps can offer a proper Assistive Access mode [0], but when most developers these days put writing a real app in the ‘too hard’ basket, getting them to actually use platform features feels like an impossibly long shot.
Thanks, that is good to know! Sad to learn that even the most mainstream of apps with incredible profit margins don't seem to find this worth implementing. This would have been a reason to switch some of my family onto Apple
"I know there are accessibility modes, but you don’t want to have to go through all that and spend hours trying to customize the phone."
I don't think the author has actually tried "Assistive Access" mode: https://support.apple.com/guide/assistive-access-iphone/abou...
It is ideal for the elderly or those with cognitive disabilities. It removes almost every complex feature and reduces the rest to large clearly labelled buttons. And it doesn't take that long to enable.
I highly recommend it.