[WesolyKubeczek]

The truth is, big tech corporations could probably skimp on accessibility as well, but they want their government contracts very much, and software used in governments, as far as at least the proverbial first world is concerned, has an accessibility bar it must meet. And it just so happens that these corporations have large chunks of money to invest in that.

If requirements for being in such lucrative markets loosen up, I'm willing to bet accessibility in Apple/Microsoft offerings will get defunded and rot away.

Of course you can question Red Hat and Canonical for not doing enough in the space, but truth be told, the grassroot open source efforts to make everything in open source more accessible amount to afterthoughts at best. How many GUI toolkit have appeared recently? How many of them are accessible? How many terminal applications gain TrueColor support and draw fancy stuff in the terminal? How many of them are of any use to someone who can't see your efforts in repurposing Unicode symbols to draw pictures in the console?

[sneak]

Nah. Apple’s commitment to pervasive accessibility features has been around for so long and has had so much investment into it it is clear it is in their DNA.

It’s probably the nicest thing about the company, and it stands out even more in the last ten or twenty years as the company becomes more and more scummy and despicable. It’s deep down and was established back when it was run by humans with deep empathy.

[AstralStorm]

Yeah, right. Do not confuse accessibility with simplicity.

So much accessibility that:

You need to use gestures to access critical functions.

Half of screen readers cannot be connected to their hardware.

You cannot easily get someone to write a driver for exotic input hardware.

There's no zoom feature in the OS.

Recently many UIs just break with big scale factors.

Keyboard support is lacking altogether in some bits of the UI.

Information is hidden and alpears at random.

Not to say Windows or Linux is free of it or better. The platforms are bad in different ways.

[tarboreus]

I get the Apple suspicion, but there's great Zoom functionality on every Apple device I've used. Also color invert, screen reader, and a whole rack of other a11y features. I agree that it's the nicest thing about the company.

[Ndymium]

> There's no zoom feature in the OS.

macOS absolutely has a zoom feature. I use it regularly, it's bound to ctrl + mouse scroll for me.

More: https://support.apple.com/en-il/guide/mac-help/mchl779716b8/...