AccessAbility Solutions

I wanted to help my daughter with special needs remotely but the two- factor authentication didn’t actually allow me to do this without her device being there. This makes helping her less helpful. I have to sort her emails. But she has to be with me to do this. And why is there is no option to switch it off???

In the worlds of Victor Meldrew” I don’t believe it!” A client I am working with wanted a simple thing – something that has been working the way she wanted it but has changed we think on the last apple update. She wanted to be able to see all her emails with dates eg 09/01/19 format. She is partially sighted and would find it useful for her to have that option.

So we rang Apple support. The response when I told my query was a typically optimistic one from the apple support desk “yes we can do that” and ” we have the answer for you.”

Well an hour later the problem had not been resolved to my client’s satisfaction. She still had days of the week appearing in her email summary and we were no nearer forward. Our Apple support referred to a higher level – a super support operative – who also could not get the situation resolved. Why was this the case?

The reason being that Apple had made a global change that they thought people wanted. Why had they done this? There doesn’t seem a reason other than they thought people would prefer this. Check it out yourself your emails will display the time of the email for the current day and days of the week or yesterday for previous days until the previous week when dates apply. There is no way of changing this and my client is frustrated. But not only that – during the process of trying to understand what had happened we had to reset her device.

Resetting your ipad when Accessibility Options are in operation

Resetting was not a good idea for my client which I questioned at the time but being a good obedient customer I obliged. Needless to say all her custom settings to make the device accessible for her had gone.

My advice to any user with Accessibilty Options set is not to do this unless you have noted all the changes you have made.

In our case it was many we:-

• changed to Larger Text in Accessibility
• we had speaking selected text on
• we had zoom switched off
• we had the magnifyer switched on
• we had zoom in display & brightness switched on ( this was a strange one as I think this options should be in accessibility)  why did we need this? Because we needed the icons bigger and this is the only way this is done
• we had the background screen set to black.
• Pages needed the presenter mode switched on
• …..and so it goes on

I told this to the super apple operative and made her aware I would be working for the next hour on restoring these settings. I suggested that all apple operators should be trained in-depth on the effect of reset on Accessibility Options. This reset is not erasing data but it does erase the Accessibility Options. There needs to be a setting in the reset options made that states ” Reset your device but keeping your data and Accessibility Options you have made ” option.

Apple boasts it has Accessibility at the core of all its business which is true to an extent but this particular incident shows that small changes can make a big impact on a person with disability which is not always in the interest or preference of the disabled person – in this case for visual impairment. Surely, there should always be options or choices built into any operating system to customize it for people with disabilities rather than making a blanket change because the company thinks the user wants it?

Anyway Apple have raised this on their community and a link will be shared with me when that is done. I think I will put my link to this article on it too!