I’ve noticed in recent years that more and more apps only offer “small, medium, large” font size settings. My problem is simple. I am visually impaired and need VERY large fonts.

I need my font size set like this:

https://share.icloud.com/photos/08bSDwyyJZm2X4g1f9iZ6mreA

But instead, with more and more apps like Ivory for example, the biggest I can get is this:

https://share.icloud.com/photos/00eUunqHWyZkEWCuFpHlPmVEA

I suspect that the culprit may be Swift UI, but I have no evidence for this.

Does anyone understand the reasoning behind this trend, and is there any possible fix for end users other than begging application developers to have pity? :)

Thanks!

  • Libb@jlai.lu
    2·
    10 hours ago

    The reasoning is that too many developers and execs don’t give a flying fuck about accessibility features

    A bit late to the party but 100% this.

    One of the reasons why I’ve slowly started switching toward Linux, after 35 years being an Apple customer myself, is that I find Linux much more comfortable to use: being 50+ and not having the best eyesight I appreciate being allowed to make the text as big as I need it to be so I can f*cking read it, no matter what some constipated designer decided in their office somewhere at Cupertino.

    I like Apple, I won’t deny it and I would probably never have even considered using Linux instead of Apple products if it was not for the way they made their design so user-unfriendly. That, and the lack of repairability/upgradability, aka the lack of ownership on our hardware.

    • hydroptic@sopuli.xyz
      2·
      6 hours ago

      I think this current Macbook is probably going to be my last Apple machine. I’ve been using both Macs and various Linux and BSD setups for the past ~25 years and I’ve appreciated having a low-friction, low-hassle UNIX OS with great UX. I’ve been exclusively running macOS for a few years now, and with each successive macOS version I just feel more and more that not only does the quality go down (even the fucking main development language, Swift, is buggy and poorly planned), but I also have less and less control over what’s actually running on my machine. For example, even if you toggle Siri off it’ll still do something with your data (fuck knows what) and actually disabling it requires first disabling SIP, and there’s also seemingly no way to opt out of Apple’s frankly creepy “trial” system which nobody really knows much about in the first place – they’re apparently running some sort of ML-related experiments on users via triald, but good fucking luck finding out much more than that.

      Even the accessibility situation is deteriorating, especially for accessibility clients (so things like screen readers etc) – the API is ancient, extremely poorly documented, and a huge pain in the ass to actually use from Swift. And don’t get me started on the terrible state of Apple’s developer documentation in general…