Post #968902

I didn't bring a laptop with me on my holiday. Using only an iPhone for more than a week (with a bit under a week to go) is really grinding my gears. While some of it is just general efficiency differences that everyone experiences regarcless of disability, most of it is a myriad of seemingly trivial but unbelievably painful accessibility papercuts experienced all over the place, like focus not being restored correctly when you switch apps; or focus bouncing away from where you put it and having to (sometimes repeatedly) move it back, especially when it bounces just as you're double tapping to activate so you end up activating the wrong thing; or controls inexplicably disappearing from left/right flick VoiceOver navigation, especially when the buttons are tiny and hard to locate with muscle memory; or the keyboard disappearing while you're trying to locate the Passwords button, thus taking the Passwords button with it; or auto language switching which you can't disable, especially on Apple Watch where loading a different voice can take more than 5 seconds; or websites which cause WebKit + VoiceOver to lag so badly that they're completely unusable; or asymmetric VoiceOver flick navigation such that if you miss a control, you can't necessarily get back to it quickly; or large items which cause other items to disappear from VoiceOver flick navigation, requiring you to faf about with manual scrolling and explore by touch until they reappear. And these are just the issues off the top of my head. On one hand, it's great that I can do a whole bunch of stuff on a pocket sized device, especially given that I'm travelling and carrying around and getting out a laptop isn't logistically practical. On the other hand, some of these issues combined this morning resulted in a (rather fiddly) booking management task taking nearly 2 hours when it probably would have taken me less than 15 minutes on desktop, and I probably couldn't count how much time the issues cost me throughout the rest of the week. I would never have tolerated this kind of stuff when I was working on NVDA, and I don't tolerate it in the Firefox browser engine now. It boggles my mind (even if it's not at all surprising to me) that big tech companies are content to let utter crap like this slide, as a matter of pride if nothing else. And since every commercial platform after Windows and Mac is completely locked down, there's little to no chance of this ever improving now on iOS or Android, let alone any platform that comes after. We are forever bound to the whims of big tech companies, with no way to compete to improve the situation ourselves or pressure big tech to do better. It's so damned depressing.