Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by bloppe 462 days ago
The standards issue is only relevant to E2EE. It has no bearing on the usability issues here. The E2EE issues should be fixed soon according to Apple. I'd bet a good amount of money the usability issues will remain.

It used to be black text on green: https://mobiforge.com/files/iphone-sms-1.jpg

The white-on-acid-green color combination would not make it through any accessibility review. It's literally impossible for a lot of color-impaired people to see, and objectively unpleasant otherwise.

Apple gets plenty of complaints about it. Just look at the Apple forums. Their literal advice to fix it is "make your friends buy an iPhone".
2 comments
Aloisius 462 days ago
> It's literally impossible for a lot of color-impaired people to see

What form of color blindness doesn't let people differentiate between levels of brightness? I checked a couple color blindness simulators and it appears legible.

Heck, white on light green appears to be used in articles about good design for color blind accessibility without any indication that it there's anything wrong with it.

https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2016/06/improving-color-acc...

link
sbuk 462 days ago
As someone with strong deuteranopia (I struggle to differentiate shades of green and darker bluey-reds), I am extremely sceptical about that claim too. For what it's worth, I've never had a problem reading the white-on-green bubbles in Messages. I do agree that a contrast closer to WCAG's recommendation would be better (currently 2:1, recommendation is ~4.5:1), but this is a diversion. The point I was making is that no matter what Apple does here, there is visible differentiation, and people will complain about it.
link
sbuk 462 days ago
Google provides a client and infrastructure, which they sell to carriers and which has a number of proprietary extensions, including E2EE if the message is Google to Google. If a carrier does not provide Universal Profile, Google provides it. If you send a message using Google Messages, it may default to Google's profile, which is not open and only available to Google Messages users, which is arguably no different to iMessage. Apple provides an RCS client which relies on carrier infrastructure. If there is no compatible profile AIUI, it falls back to MMS or fails.
link