Ahead of WWDC, Apple Invites Some Developers to Attend Virtual Accessibility Session

Apple is inviting some developers to a special Accessibility session designed to teach them how iOS apps can take advantage of accessibility features built into the operating system, according to an email shared by developer Steve Troughton-Smith.

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The event, set to be held on April 23, will be an online session that takes place live, with developers able to ask questions and sign up for individual consultations. This is the first time Apple has held an online event where developers are able to interact with engineers.

It appears that Apple may be using the session as a test run for WWDC, which is set to be a digital-only event this year. Apple plans to offer an online keynote and online sessions, which will likely be similar to the Accessibility session.

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Top Rated Comments

VictorTango777 Avatar
65 months ago
It appears that Apple is trying to score political points by moving settings from application preferences and burying them in Accessibility on both iOS and MacOS, in order to inflate the number of settings in Accessibility. Apple wants to say "Look at us, we have this Accessibility thing with all these settings" when many of those settings should be located in more appropriate places. Examples:

On a Mac laptop, you go to System Preferences > Mouse and you can change scrolling speed. If you go to System Preferences > Trackpad, there is no scrolling speed. Instead, it is buried somewhere in Accessibility preferences.

In System Preferences > Mouse, there is no option to adjust pointer size. Instead, that setting is buried somewhere in Accessibility preferences.

To turn off spring loaded folders in the Finder, you don't go to Finder Preferences. Instead, that setting is buried somewhere in Accessibility preferences.

On iPhone and iPad if you go to Settings >Display & Brightness, there is no setting to control auto brightness. Instead, you have to go to Accessibility.

On iPhones and iPads that have Touch ID, you can configure whether you can wake and unlock the device without having to first press and release home button and then put your finger on the Touch ID. You can just press the home button to wake the device and activate Touch ID without having to release the button. But instead of having this option in Settings > Touch ID, it is buried in Accessibility.

Moving settings from the application and burying them in Accessibility is not helpful at all. It just causes more irritation because people now have to look in two places to find things: the application preferences and Accessibility. Now the Accessibility preferences have become as convoluted as iTunes and this helps no one.
Score: 1 Votes (Like | Disagree)
jdelaune Avatar
65 months ago
If this was a trial for WWDC then I'm glad they did it. Was meant to start at 9am...

"We apologize for the inconvenience, but there is a worldwide Webex outage that’s preventing us from starting today’s event on time. We are delaying the event to 10:00 AM BST while we work on resolving the issue."
Score: 1 Votes (Like | Disagree)