[solarkraft]

> On a tangential note, I'd like to take a moment to recognize the amount of work that Apple has put into its accessibility features. Assistive Touch on the apple watch will probably serve a remarkably small portion of the user base

On a similar note I’d like to point out that accessibility affects everyone. You don’t need to be disabled to enjoy accessibility. My eyes are fine, (I think), but I find the iPhone X’s lowest screen brightness too bright iOS’s blue filter to be barely effective, so I use a custom color filter (almost full red) and “Reduce white point” and am super happy it’s an option. People used and probably use assistive touch for things that don’t compensate a disability, but just add useful features. The back tap shortcuts are just a nice feature. The zoom is nice if you want to show something to someone a bit further away. I could go on.

As someone with perfectly fine hands I love this feature because one thing I hate about modern smart watches (RIP Pebble) is that you have to touch and inevitably smudge up the screen. Bam, problem single-handedly (what pun are you talking about?) solved. Massive kudos. The other, more obvious advantage is that your other hand stays free, of course.

> and perhaps costs more to develop than the return they'll ever see on it.

As you see, the user base for such features is bigger than you may think. Besides collecting some easy sympathy points for helping disadvantaged people, Apple also seems to be huge in the business of servicing small, but under-served and vocal minorities (where can someone who wants a modern, small phone go?), which will turn into strong advocates for their brand.

[dhosek]

When I showed the designers at a company I worked at a few years ago how to enable screen zoom, they found it an imminently useful tool. Once enabled, ctrl-scroll zooms in/out on the display which is very useful for being able to check pixel-level details on, say, an HTML render.