(no subject)
Nov. 26th, 2009 02:37 pm
Nov. 26th, 2009
Gee thanks, Apple.
Nov. 26th, 2009 03:35 pmEDIT Jan 20 2010: It was a 3GS, not a 3G. I acknowledged this in the comments way back in November 2009, but I've got an influx of new posters today who aren't reading any of the previous discussion before reaching for the Post Comment button. So, rather than pop up and tell me "LOL 3GS" as if that changed anything about my actual experience, just accept that a dozen people have already pointed out that error and go on to actually discussing the problem.
I'm not editing the post, beyond adding this note so you will all stop emailing me to tell me the same thing. "3GS not 3G" has been said and acknowledged repeatedly *on the very page you're reading right now*, and you're two months late to that particular party.
============================================================
A recipe!
Ingredients:
1 Apple iPhone 3G
1 blind user
Instructions:
Mix vigorously in a small office. You will know it is done when John is banging his head against the desk.
============
Okay. the iPhone's onscreen keyboard is and always has been a nightmare, but it's only with the addition of the "accessibility features" that the true unusability of the classic Apple Experience is achieved.
1. The screen reader does not read the labels on fields, ever - it only reads the CONTENTS of the field. Worse, it doesn't read the *current* contents of the field until after it reads the *sample* contents of the field, then the type of field, and only then the current contents. So if you're trying to put in a password for an email account, and you've miraculously selected the "password" field, your only indication is "Required. Text entry. Concealed." -because the default text is "Required", and that's MUCH more important than, oh, say the word Password.
2. Turning the screen reader on disables scrolling. You *cannot* slide the screen down to get at the last settings on a page. You have to go through each field pressing "Enter" and *guessing* at what the next field label is, because it doesn't read the labels, only the default text.
3. You can't enter wireless settings for a currently unavailable network. You can specify an arbitrary SSID, encryption type, and key or passphrase, but you *cannot* save the setting unless the network is currently available and successfully connected to. This is especially annoying given....
4. If the screen reader is on, you cannot enter a wireless key, period. Oh, it will *let* you enter the key, while loudly reading it back to you and anyone else in the room, but it doesn't matter, because it will not work, period. In order to connect an iPhone to a wireless network, you MUST turn the screen reader off and let someone who can see do it for you. And, because of 3, both you and that person must be in the location of the wireless network when they do this for you. This is extremely fucking annoying for, say, a blind person who has wireless in their house but no handy sighted person to take their phone, turn off the reader, navigate the submenus, enter the key, and turn the reader back on.
5. You can't input the settings you need for email in a single step. You can't even put in a fucking server name without giving it an email address, a password, and letting it fly off to the internet and bang on things it *thinks* might be your mail server. Once you've got that, you can put in an incoming server and username, and an outgoing server, and then you wait while it *fails to connect, automatically* because it hasn't got the right port. And then you have to go back in to set your outgoing server's authentication. It takes a 3-minute process (laboriously hunt-and-peck your name, email address, password, and mail server settings) into a 15-minute process as it repeatedly "helpfully" tries things that you *know* are going to fail, but can't interrupt and can't cancel. So you wait for several minutes before it realises you really do need to use an alternate port and enable SSL.
6. You can import most, but not all, settings from an Outlook account. Settings it *won't* import include your password, despite you having physically plugged the device into a machine with which you've paired the device AND which has your password in a nice conveniently accessible package where it's already yanking settings from. And then you can't just *put in the password* on the phone when it complains that no password is set for this account, because that would be too simple. No, you need to leave the Mail app, then find Settings, scroll down (see 2), select mail and other things, select mail, select this account, select this account, find the password field (without it reading the field names, I remind you), and put in the password, then save the settings and restart the mail app. Oh, and if you typo'd, you only learn it when you start the mail app - meaning, repeat the entire process to re-enter the password.
7. You can't tell it to "show" hidden information, ever. It will happily read each character of your password out, joyfully, in a voice audible in the next office, but it will not, EVER, allow you to "display" the obscured password so that you can check for typos or even see where you were. Even more annoying when you consider...
8. Every single character entered is a multi-step process. First, you put your finger over the keyboard in what you think is the right spot, and it reads what's under your finger out to you. You hold that down and tap anywhere else on the phone to actually enter the character into the text field... and it reads it out to you again, in an absolutely identical way. This leads to....
9. It's almost impossible to get the right letter without being able to see the screen. Because you have to place your finger, listen for the right letter, then *lift it off* and place it again. Trying to slide your finger inevitably results in it thinking you're "holding" the wrong character and "pressing" the one next to it.... which then causes the phone to input that first character. Of course, you don't *know* whether it just inputted the wrong character, or whether it just announced that you'd re-selected the same wrong character, because there's absolutely no difference in the audio cues.
10. Turning the phone sideways will not turn the keyboard or expand the characters while the screen reader is on. So you're stuck with those teeny little softkeys.
11. Most of the interfaces for email and texts *rely* on visual cues and multi-step visual-only processes. Like, for example, the dificulty in deleting a text message. There's a "delete" button that the reader will happily read out to you, that does nothing, and the reader helpfully only says "delete grey", because the button is greyed out. There's the text message itself, which can be touched to highlight it - but Delete still doesn't work. You have to find a teeny little icon NEXT TO the text in order to put a checkbox in it, and then hit Delete *without* touching the message, or any other message.
12. If you CAN see the screen, all of the on-screen instructions are lies when the screen reader is active. That little "slide to unlock" thingy? Nope. You *hold that and then double-click elsewhere on the screen* to unlock. But it still *says* slide to unlock. Good luck figuring THAT one out!
Accessible, my ass. These are trivial problems that should have been found and fixed extremely early in the QA process, even if they'd somehow gotten past the interface design stage. But, oh, wait, this is an Apple product: No usability testing ever, no interface design considerations that don't match the current active developer's personal workflow or the current marketroid's powerpoint slides, no QA process, and no customisation, ever. I almost forgot.
The Apple iPhone 3G: One More In A Long Series Of Fuck Yous To The Blind, From The Company That *Always* Says Fuck You To The User.
EDIT: Oh, yeah, I almost forgot: You can't sync your calendar and contacts and the like without having iTunes. So you install iTunes, and it installs it's bundled malware, and you start it up and plug in your iPhone.
Try navigating iTunes with your screen off, a copy of JAWS installed, and your keyboard, no mouse.
Get to your phone, then your settings, then open up the sync settings and tell it that you want your Outlook contacts, email, and calendar.
Go ahead.
I dare you.
I'm not editing the post, beyond adding this note so you will all stop emailing me to tell me the same thing. "3GS not 3G" has been said and acknowledged repeatedly *on the very page you're reading right now*, and you're two months late to that particular party.
============================================================
A recipe!
Ingredients:
1 Apple iPhone 3G
1 blind user
Instructions:
Mix vigorously in a small office. You will know it is done when John is banging his head against the desk.
============
Okay. the iPhone's onscreen keyboard is and always has been a nightmare, but it's only with the addition of the "accessibility features" that the true unusability of the classic Apple Experience is achieved.
1. The screen reader does not read the labels on fields, ever - it only reads the CONTENTS of the field. Worse, it doesn't read the *current* contents of the field until after it reads the *sample* contents of the field, then the type of field, and only then the current contents. So if you're trying to put in a password for an email account, and you've miraculously selected the "password" field, your only indication is "Required. Text entry. Concealed." -because the default text is "Required", and that's MUCH more important than, oh, say the word Password.
2. Turning the screen reader on disables scrolling. You *cannot* slide the screen down to get at the last settings on a page. You have to go through each field pressing "Enter" and *guessing* at what the next field label is, because it doesn't read the labels, only the default text.
3. You can't enter wireless settings for a currently unavailable network. You can specify an arbitrary SSID, encryption type, and key or passphrase, but you *cannot* save the setting unless the network is currently available and successfully connected to. This is especially annoying given....
4. If the screen reader is on, you cannot enter a wireless key, period. Oh, it will *let* you enter the key, while loudly reading it back to you and anyone else in the room, but it doesn't matter, because it will not work, period. In order to connect an iPhone to a wireless network, you MUST turn the screen reader off and let someone who can see do it for you. And, because of 3, both you and that person must be in the location of the wireless network when they do this for you. This is extremely fucking annoying for, say, a blind person who has wireless in their house but no handy sighted person to take their phone, turn off the reader, navigate the submenus, enter the key, and turn the reader back on.
5. You can't input the settings you need for email in a single step. You can't even put in a fucking server name without giving it an email address, a password, and letting it fly off to the internet and bang on things it *thinks* might be your mail server. Once you've got that, you can put in an incoming server and username, and an outgoing server, and then you wait while it *fails to connect, automatically* because it hasn't got the right port. And then you have to go back in to set your outgoing server's authentication. It takes a 3-minute process (laboriously hunt-and-peck your name, email address, password, and mail server settings) into a 15-minute process as it repeatedly "helpfully" tries things that you *know* are going to fail, but can't interrupt and can't cancel. So you wait for several minutes before it realises you really do need to use an alternate port and enable SSL.
6. You can import most, but not all, settings from an Outlook account. Settings it *won't* import include your password, despite you having physically plugged the device into a machine with which you've paired the device AND which has your password in a nice conveniently accessible package where it's already yanking settings from. And then you can't just *put in the password* on the phone when it complains that no password is set for this account, because that would be too simple. No, you need to leave the Mail app, then find Settings, scroll down (see 2), select mail and other things, select mail, select this account, select this account, find the password field (without it reading the field names, I remind you), and put in the password, then save the settings and restart the mail app. Oh, and if you typo'd, you only learn it when you start the mail app - meaning, repeat the entire process to re-enter the password.
7. You can't tell it to "show" hidden information, ever. It will happily read each character of your password out, joyfully, in a voice audible in the next office, but it will not, EVER, allow you to "display" the obscured password so that you can check for typos or even see where you were. Even more annoying when you consider...
8. Every single character entered is a multi-step process. First, you put your finger over the keyboard in what you think is the right spot, and it reads what's under your finger out to you. You hold that down and tap anywhere else on the phone to actually enter the character into the text field... and it reads it out to you again, in an absolutely identical way. This leads to....
9. It's almost impossible to get the right letter without being able to see the screen. Because you have to place your finger, listen for the right letter, then *lift it off* and place it again. Trying to slide your finger inevitably results in it thinking you're "holding" the wrong character and "pressing" the one next to it.... which then causes the phone to input that first character. Of course, you don't *know* whether it just inputted the wrong character, or whether it just announced that you'd re-selected the same wrong character, because there's absolutely no difference in the audio cues.
10. Turning the phone sideways will not turn the keyboard or expand the characters while the screen reader is on. So you're stuck with those teeny little softkeys.
11. Most of the interfaces for email and texts *rely* on visual cues and multi-step visual-only processes. Like, for example, the dificulty in deleting a text message. There's a "delete" button that the reader will happily read out to you, that does nothing, and the reader helpfully only says "delete grey", because the button is greyed out. There's the text message itself, which can be touched to highlight it - but Delete still doesn't work. You have to find a teeny little icon NEXT TO the text in order to put a checkbox in it, and then hit Delete *without* touching the message, or any other message.
12. If you CAN see the screen, all of the on-screen instructions are lies when the screen reader is active. That little "slide to unlock" thingy? Nope. You *hold that and then double-click elsewhere on the screen* to unlock. But it still *says* slide to unlock. Good luck figuring THAT one out!
Accessible, my ass. These are trivial problems that should have been found and fixed extremely early in the QA process, even if they'd somehow gotten past the interface design stage. But, oh, wait, this is an Apple product: No usability testing ever, no interface design considerations that don't match the current active developer's personal workflow or the current marketroid's powerpoint slides, no QA process, and no customisation, ever. I almost forgot.
The Apple iPhone 3G: One More In A Long Series Of Fuck Yous To The Blind, From The Company That *Always* Says Fuck You To The User.
EDIT: Oh, yeah, I almost forgot: You can't sync your calendar and contacts and the like without having iTunes. So you install iTunes, and it installs it's bundled malware, and you start it up and plug in your iPhone.
Try navigating iTunes with your screen off, a copy of JAWS installed, and your keyboard, no mouse.
Get to your phone, then your settings, then open up the sync settings and tell it that you want your Outlook contacts, email, and calendar.
Go ahead.
I dare you.
I'm just sayin'.
I warned him, it's not my fault how far this spreads.