Apple is often lauded for their leadership in accessibility, and rightfully so. But it is not without its dark side. Over the past several years, Apple has been unbelievably sloppy with regard to their accessibility stack. When I say sloppy, I mean that major features just won’t work. Everything connected to the zoom feature has been buggy and unpredictable for the past decade. It is as if they have one person working on it and no people testing it. The reason you don’t hear about the dark side of Apple accessibility is because very few people use it that write about it for a living. They have no idea what is going on with accessibility apart from what they read in a press release. As long as they get uncritical praise from people who don’t actually rely on those systems, they have no incentive to fix anything. But enough complaining. Let’s dive in. But first…

By way of introduction, I want to make it clear that this is not a tutorial. I am not trying to teach anyone how to use these features. Perhaps I will write a book on the subject. But for now, that is someone else’s burden. I also want to disclaim that my focus in on the low-vision stack because I have low vision and use it every moment that I am using a computer or iDevice. I know about the other features. But they will be left for the people who use them to discuss. Finally, I cannot tell anyone which product is best for them. I am only going to be talking about these features from my perspective in hopes that it helps you decide which platform is best for you from a low vision perspective. With that, let’s dive in…

Resolution

If you are on an iOS device, look up at the clock at the top left of your screen. If you are on a Mac, look for it at the top right. Can you read the time? If you can, you probably don’t have low vision in the way that I mean it and the way the term is used in the medical community. I am a pretty high-functioning low vision user. And I cannot come close to reading the time unmodified on either platform. Look at your iPhone. Can you read the name of the apps on your Home Screen? I can’t, and neither can anyone with low vision.

On a Mac, the first thing you will want to adjust is the display resolution. You will want to crank it down to the lowest setting. In an unintuitive way, the lower the numbers, the bigger things appear on screen. Drop that resolution to as low as it will go. That will be a big improvement. You still won’t be able to read the clock. But it will be bigger. On iOS, there is no user-adjustable resolution. It is what it is. There are some mitigations for this. But for the most part, what you see is what you get. So with regard to resolution, it is the Mac for the low-vision win.

Accept that is not the whole story. iOS has a feature that allows you to scale the system font to a larger size. App fonts can also be scaled subject to the developer of the app. It is not automatic. There are more caveats. Not every element gets scaled. So the small strip at the top of the screen that displays the time, battery life, etc., does not get bigger in any meaningful way. The same is true for the names of the apps on the Home Screen.

However, inside the apps are a different story. Some use the size you have chosen which means that mail messages are quite large if that is your preference. On the Mac, most never get a large font regardless of the settings you choose in Mail. Just trust me on that. It is due to how mail is handled on the different systems. So before awarding the win to the Mac for resolution, many elements on the iPad are resolution independent. That means that more of the things that matter to you might get better enlargement on the iPad than they do on the Mac. I’m going to call this one a tie. But the iPad might actually have a slight edge.

Zoom

The one thing all low-visions users need is an easy way to magnify what is on the screen. Regardless of the system, there will always be many elements that are too small. If you attempt to enlarge too many elements, it will break the interface and make it unusable. By necessity, there must be a few compromises in the best system. That is why the Zoom feature can make or break a system.

That said, it is a feature that is hard to get right. Almost all of Apple’s accessibility issues are related to Zoom in one way or the other. Without being exhaustive, here are a few elements of what a Zoom feature should be expected to do:

• Magnify the entire screen permanently and allow for smooth panning
• Magnify the entire screen temporarily
• Magnify a portion of the screen permanently or temporarily

There is a lot more than that. Both systems have Zoom features. But this is where some complexity needs to be introduced. Zoom is a different animal when triggered from a keyboard than it is from touch. There are many shortcuts that allow the user to trigger different kinds of Zoom features. Many of those keyboard shortcuts are shared between Mac and iOS. From a user perspective, the feature is more robust and mature on the Mac than on iOS. It tends to be more reliable.

Although the Mac will win this round, I just want to say that the iPad handles Zoom responsibilities very well despite having limitations. It does some things the Mac does not. There is room for both to improve. Again, I could write a couple of long chapters on this feature. I will just say that you are covered well on both. But the Mac does a better job overall.

Speech

Apple uses the same speech engine on both systems. That is a good thing because it is very good. The reason it is so important is that no matter how much you zoom to read things, you will run into many things that are just too difficult to read with your eyes. What you need is a quick way to trigger temporary reading by the device to spare you from the task. This is one of the places where the two systems are very different. The Mac wins this one hands down.

On the Mac, you can set spoken content to start reading at any point on the screen. Once started, you get transport controls that allow you to play, pause, rewind, fast-forward, and more. There is also a mode that will read whatever is under the pointer. You can have it do those continuously, or only when zoomed. You can activate a hot key so that you can just have something spoken like the time, or date, or a caption. And it will stop speaking when you release the keys. It is a brilliant feature that is hard to live without.

Live without it, you will on iOS. In some places, you can kind of have speech start at a random spot. But that is mostly not the case. I’m not explaining well. But just trust me on this one. There is no ability on iOS to do a quick key-press and have the system speak. You can place a speech controller on the screen. And it lives there forever. Unlike other controllers, you cannot activate it with the trackpad or keyboard. It has to be done via touch. Actually, you can do it if you set up full keyboard control. But there are reasons why you wouldn’t want to do that. If you heavily rely on spoken content, this is where the Mac pulls away. It is not even close.

Hover Text

Hover Text is my favorite feature of any kind on any system ever. And it is exclusive to the Mac for some inexplicable reason. This was pure magic when it was first introduced a few years ago. It is a combination of accessibility features that makes something incredible. When the feature is on and functioning, a text box appears. When you type, your words appear in that box as large as you want them the be. They appear in whatever font you want, in whatever color and background you want, completely undefended of the system’s preferences.

You can lock the feature so that everything your mouse passes is magnified in this box in the form of text. Mouse over the comments under an article and they are shown in the Hover Text box with your preferences. You can also keep it unlocked and just bring it up with the press of a button. Hover your mouse over the time and it is shown with your preference. Release the button and everything is as it was.

But wait, there’s more! You can set it up so that when something is enlarged in the Hover Text box, it is also spoken by the computer. This is truly the killer app for low vision users. It is transformative. But there is a dark side. This feature hasn’t worked almost since it was released. It is extremely buggy at times as if it were still in beta. It has gotten no love. And I haven’t been able to use it for a long time until Monterey beta 5. It still works in beta 6. But it could be broken again by beta 7. So the fact that it does not exist on the iPad has not been a factor because in practice, it hasn’t existed on the Mac either. If it stick around, it is the end of the low vision accessibility discussion.

Conclusion: Little Touches

Touch is going to always be a more difficult proposition for low vision users. When I stretch out my hand to touch something on the iPad screen, there is a disparity between where my finger is and what my eye sees. I am always a few pixels off. And that is usually enough to fail to trigger the action I wanted. It is nice to have trackpad support for the iPad. But it is not real trackpad support because the pointer is an inaccurate blob on the screen. So like my finger, I am never sure if I have hit the target correctly.

A laptop is inherently more accessible than a touch device. I doubt that will ever change. That said, the iPad is a viable solution for people with low vision. And I don’t think that can be said about any other tablet, even a Microsoft tablet. But no tablet is as good of a solution as a laptop for accessibility. And no laptop is better at it than a Mac laptop, despite my many complaints. That said, I have used iPads as my only work mobile many times over long periods of time. I love the platform. But this is just one of those many reasons why at the end of the day, I keep coming back to the Mac.

David Johnson