
Apple’s new feature a step towards digital apartheid - navs
https://axesslab.com/digital-apartheid/
======
nafey
I agree that this new feature is problematic but it can be due to oversight by
Apple and not an intentional policy of marginalisation of the visually
impaired people. Hence perhaps the headline should not use the term apartheid.

~~~
jareds
Maybe Apple should take accessibility more seriously then? I'm a Voiceover
user on iOS and accessibility has been regressing recently. Two examples I can
think of include the fact that in the last several releases of iOS Voiceover
can no longer read an entire article in the news app with out losing focus as
well as the fact that all reviews in the app store have "developer response"
announced even when none are available. Apple also appears to make no effort
to engage with the accessibility community in the same way Microsoft or Google
do. While Apple may have been a pioneer in accessibility I'm starting to look
at cheep Android One phones to determine if I can switch from iOS.

------
0815test
Very nice article, but I'd say that this horse has left the barn a long time
ago. "Responsive" web technologies in general make it so that the website
owner can discover things about the client that they arguably shouldn't be
able to. This new Apple feature is merely extending that well-established
pattern and including accessibility technology as part of it.

~~~
jareds
As a blind user I don't want an easy way for websites or add tracking code to
know if I'm using a screen reader. If this feature has to exist then it should
be a site by site option that is disabled by default. I can then make the
choice to determine if I want a site to know I'm using a screen reader based
on the reasoning the site is asking. A blog does not need to know if I'm using
a screen reader while a single page app may. I would argue that if a site has
screen reader specific code they are doing things wrong but at least having to
manually enable the option on a specific site would allow me to decide if the
downsides of the site knowing I am blind are worth the reasoning they ask me
to enable it.

------
mcphage
What information does iOS set or provide as a result of this setting? Is it
something in the user agent, or what?

