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The post says this: "I know there are accessibility modes, but you don’t want to have to go through all that and spend hours trying to customize the phone." I

The post says this: "I know there are accessibility modes, but you don’t want to have to go through all that and spend hours trying to customize the phone." I don't think the author has actually tried "Assistive Access" mode: https://support.apple.com/guide/assistive-access-iphone/about-assistive-access-iphb86e84e2baa/ios https://support.apple.com/guide/assistive-access-iphone/abou... It is ideal for the elderly or those with cognitive disabilities. It removes almost every complex feature and reduces the rest to large clearly labelled buttons. And it doesn't take that long to enable. I highly recommend it.

heavyset_go 1y ago
The author says this in their OP: > The phones are too fiddly now, and pressing random things as they try to hold the phone meant the phone got lost in a sea of opening stuff up. So, I tried the assistive access, but why isn’t this an option from the get-go? It asks you the age of setup; why not have a 65+ or something for a senior mode?
- wickedsight 1y ago
  > why not have a 65+ or something for a senior mode? Damn... I'm guessing OP is pretty young or something. I know people 80+ who have hardly any problems with regular iOS. I also know people under 60 who do. Age isn't a great thing to assume ability from.
  - julian_t 1y ago
    Dam' right (he says, still developing at 70). Getting older may be compulsory, but I regularly have to help the youngsters out with tech-related matters.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
    63, and I learn new stuff, every day. I need to remember that I don't represent the norm, when it comes to stuff like that. I guess the saddest thing (to me), is seeing people that consider learning to be a pain point. Even young folks don't want to learn. Us geeks aren't exactly representative of the vast majority of folks. That often makes it difficult for us to design stuff for them.
    - Vegenoid 1y ago
      There are plenty of people who want to learn, but don’t want to learn about everchanging and inane software design decisions. There are plenty of geeks who don’t want to have to learn about that.
      - ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
        Knowing what to learn about, is one of the advantages of gray hair. There’s ten thousand jargon-driven primrose paths. When I was younger, I went down a couple.
- rchaud 1y ago
  they might want to switch to a Samsung phone, which has an "Easy Mode" setting for exactly this reason.
fragmede 1y ago
Someone later on in the thread very gently tells OP about them, but how frustrating is that!
creata 1y ago
Maybe it's the best compromise, but there's something sad about Apple essentially making an entire second set of apps because they couldn't make the main ones accessible enough. It's like siloing people off into their own universe instead of making this one comfortable for them.
- Barbing 1y ago
  I can’t speak to whether it’s the _best_ compromise but if you see a screenshot of the way they dumb down the Camera app I think it does make it more clear that for example perhaps not a single reader of this website would ever find it remotely acceptable. Like no video if I recall correctly. I mean I’m sure with infinite time someone would find a better compromise.
  - heartbreak 1y ago
    You can turn on video in assistive access, but it’s off by default.
    - Barbing 1y ago
      Forgot about that, yes!
- amelius 1y ago
  And nobody can write an app that helps the user use other apps, because apps are not allowed to do that. Only Apple is allowed. Thank you Apple nanny state.
  - worldsayshi 1y ago
    It's an understandable limitation because such app permissions seem quite hairy from a security perspective.
    - amelius 1y ago
      Yes, and hitting a nail is very hairy from a safety perspective. That doesn't mean there should be 1 single blessed company with a license to carpentry.
eszed 1y ago
Earlier this year I set an iPad up for my elderly dad - it was going to be used for podcasts and YouTube, only - and it looked like it was going to be ideal. "What a great feature," I thought! Except... There is no way to turn off screen rotation. None. It can't be done in the Assistive Access menu, and doesn't respect the setting in normal mode. It just always rotates. I spent an hour on the phone with Apple Support, and there's nothing to be done about it. My dad couldn't deal with his icons rotating around on the screen, nor not being able to watch videos while lying down. It gathered dust.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago
  > There is no way to turn off screen rotation Control Center > Rotation Lock [1]. It's been a feature for years for pilots. [1] https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/rotate-your-iphone-screen-iph3badf94ec/ios https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/rotate-your-iphone-sc...
  - mulmen 1y ago
    Does this work in Assistive Access? I would try it myself but I’m scared I will get trapped.
    - yard2010 1y ago
      I think this comment is the essence of this post and the general sentiment. They make software the user is scared to interact with. This is backwards Apple. They just need to do the opposite of what they're doing and they nail it.
      - thewebguyd 1y ago
        > They make software the user is scared to interact with. Apple isn't unique here either. This is a sentiment across nearly all OSes, on mobile and on desktop. It's one of the primary sources of help desk tickets where I work (I'm IT manager, grew up doing helpdesk->sysadmin). People are afraid to even try some basic troubleshooting, afraid to click on dialog boxes, afraid to mess with settings. Even auto-save in Office freaks people out, they are afraid to close their documents because that Ctrl+S feedback loop is gone, and autosave is ambiguous. Is it instant? How do I know it's saved the change I just made? So now there's users that need to go and double check the modified timestamp on the file before closing the document. I get downvoted and called old every time I say this but Win 95/98 was peak UX. We are chasing aesthetics now instead of actual usability design. Marketing got too involved in how things looked, everything needs to be a customized, branded "experience" and it's causing severe learning curves vs. just following OS conventions and widgets where every app more or less looked and operated the same way. Where's all the UX designers and researchers? Oh right, we've laid them all off or just spent too many years not listening to what they had to say and letting the rent seeking marketing and accounting folks drive the products.
lucb1e 1y ago
I just tried going through the setup on a friend's work phone to try it out because it looked useful for my grandpa (he currently has a dumbphone due to eyesight issues, can't really use a touchscreen, but maybe this mode might work with big enough buttons and TTS) Issues: 1. It says "no results" if you look for "assi" in the settings. I wondered if this phone model doesn't support it, but ended up finding it manually near the bottom of the accessibility settings 2. The setup process is confusing, asking questions we don't know. E.g. need to confirm we know the "passcode" without saying what that is or having a field to try it out on. Does it mean lockscreen PIN? Then sure. We just pressed continue and hoped for the best. It also asks whether apps, that have been on the phone since forever, suddenly need a bunch of permissions. Will this mess with the friend's old settings outside of this special mode? We have no idea what was set and what to pick, e.g. does WhatsApp need contact access to work? Speech recognition? One of them even says "this is unexpected, please report this" How? Where? To what end? 3. Eventually got to the last screen and pressed the button for "Ok, we're ready now, enable!" and it pops up an error message: can't enable with the SIM PIN active, disable this in "settings" (ok which settings, where? Why not link it?) 4. Thankfully, this time we can find that in settings' search and... it's already disabled. I go back to assistive access and the error persists I literally can't get this set up... Edit: wanted to show the friend whose work phone this is the silliness of an error that says X and another screen saying the opposite. Now the SIM PIN shows up as enabled! So I pressed disable, they entered the PIN, and it gave another error message. But upon closing the screen, it showed as disabled again. Hoping it was real this time, went back to assistive access and now it could be enabled! Turns out... assistive access only works for the standard apps: Phone/dialer, SMS, camera, gallery, magnifier You can enable e.g. Google Maps but it has no idea that you're in assistive mode and shows you the normal UI. It also tells you to go and enable location access in settings, which you can't do in this mode. (I had enabled precise location during the setup of assistive access, but apparently it's broken.) This does have TTS for the SMS messages, that's nice, but he'd not be able to answer them and have a conversation anyway The magnifier is too jittery to be useful (his dumbphone has the same feature and issue) Going back out of assistive access mode, it seems the new app permission levels persisted outside this mode and some things are messed up now (whatsapp complaining it is missing access, for example) TL;DR same functionality as the 60€ dumbphone / flip phone my grandpa has, except (pro) you also get SMS TTS, (con) it's all non-tactile buttons, and (con) you can't flip the phone open to unlock the screen or accept a call. Especially that last one turned out to be really easy for the two grandparents that can't use a smartphone (one with visual, one with mental impairments). I'd recommend saving 500€ and going for the more accessible option instead
layer8 1y ago
It’s also very limiting, though. You can’t even zoom into photos, which elders with bad eyesight like to do.
- bunderbunder 1y ago
  For that you need to use screen magnification. Triple tap with three fingers to zoom in and zoom out. While you're zoomed, drag with three fingers to pan the view. But I also kinda feel like just saying that says a lot about Apple's UX these days, especially in the accessibility department. Because those swipe gestures can be confusing and require too much manual dexterity for many people who need a feature like screen magnification.
  - layer8 1y ago
    > Triple tap with three fingers Honestly, that’s a non-starter.
  - everybodyknows 1y ago
    Re the other reply here, what's missing is discoverability -- at minimum a little circled letter "i" in the corner that would pop up a big sketch of the required gesture.
    - layer8 1y ago
      Discoverability is important, but elderly people are unlikely to be able to reliably (or at all) triple-tap with three fingers, regardless of discoverability. Many already have problems with double-pressing buttons (like for Apple Pay).

heavyset_go 1y ago

The author says this in their OP: > The phones are too fiddly now, and pressing random things as they try to hold the phone meant the phone got lost in a sea of opening stuff up. So, I tried the assistive access, but why isn’t this an option from the get-go? It asks you the age of setup; why not have a 65+ or something for a senior mode?

wickedsight 1y ago
> why not have a 65+ or something for a senior mode? Damn... I'm guessing OP is pretty young or something. I know people 80+ who have hardly any problems with regular iOS. I also know people under 60 who do. Age isn't a great thing to assume ability from.
- julian_t 1y ago
  Dam' right (he says, still developing at 70). Getting older may be compulsory, but I regularly have to help the youngsters out with tech-related matters.
- ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
  63, and I learn new stuff, every day. I need to remember that I don't represent the norm, when it comes to stuff like that. I guess the saddest thing (to me), is seeing people that consider learning to be a pain point. Even young folks don't want to learn. Us geeks aren't exactly representative of the vast majority of folks. That often makes it difficult for us to design stuff for them.
  - Vegenoid 1y ago
    There are plenty of people who want to learn, but don’t want to learn about everchanging and inane software design decisions. There are plenty of geeks who don’t want to have to learn about that.
    - ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
      Knowing what to learn about, is one of the advantages of gray hair. There’s ten thousand jargon-driven primrose paths. When I was younger, I went down a couple.
rchaud 1y ago
they might want to switch to a Samsung phone, which has an "Easy Mode" setting for exactly this reason.

fragmede 1y ago

Someone later on in the thread very gently tells OP about them, but how frustrating is that!

creata 1y ago

Maybe it's the best compromise, but there's something sad about Apple essentially making an entire second set of apps because they couldn't make the main ones accessible enough. It's like siloing people off into their own universe instead of making this one comfortable for them.

Barbing 1y ago
I can’t speak to whether it’s the _best_ compromise but if you see a screenshot of the way they dumb down the Camera app I think it does make it more clear that for example perhaps not a single reader of this website would ever find it remotely acceptable. Like no video if I recall correctly. I mean I’m sure with infinite time someone would find a better compromise.
- heartbreak 1y ago
  You can turn on video in assistive access, but it’s off by default.
  - Barbing 1y ago
    Forgot about that, yes!
amelius 1y ago
And nobody can write an app that helps the user use other apps, because apps are not allowed to do that. Only Apple is allowed. Thank you Apple nanny state.
- worldsayshi 1y ago
  It's an understandable limitation because such app permissions seem quite hairy from a security perspective.
  - amelius 1y ago
    Yes, and hitting a nail is very hairy from a safety perspective. That doesn't mean there should be 1 single blessed company with a license to carpentry.

eszed 1y ago

Earlier this year I set an iPad up for my elderly dad - it was going to be used for podcasts and YouTube, only - and it looked like it was going to be ideal. "What a great feature," I thought! Except... There is no way to turn off screen rotation. None. It can't be done in the Assistive Access menu, and doesn't respect the setting in normal mode. It just always rotates. I spent an hour on the phone with Apple Support, and there's nothing to be done about it. My dad couldn't deal with his icons rotating around on the screen, nor not being able to watch videos while lying down. It gathered dust.

JumpCrisscross 1y ago
> There is no way to turn off screen rotation Control Center > Rotation Lock [1]. It's been a feature for years for pilots. [1] https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/rotate-your-iphone-screen-iph3badf94ec/ios https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/rotate-your-iphone-sc...
- mulmen 1y ago
  Does this work in Assistive Access? I would try it myself but I’m scared I will get trapped.
  - yard2010 1y ago
    I think this comment is the essence of this post and the general sentiment. They make software the user is scared to interact with. This is backwards Apple. They just need to do the opposite of what they're doing and they nail it.
    - thewebguyd 1y ago
      > They make software the user is scared to interact with. Apple isn't unique here either. This is a sentiment across nearly all OSes, on mobile and on desktop. It's one of the primary sources of help desk tickets where I work (I'm IT manager, grew up doing helpdesk->sysadmin). People are afraid to even try some basic troubleshooting, afraid to click on dialog boxes, afraid to mess with settings. Even auto-save in Office freaks people out, they are afraid to close their documents because that Ctrl+S feedback loop is gone, and autosave is ambiguous. Is it instant? How do I know it's saved the change I just made? So now there's users that need to go and double check the modified timestamp on the file before closing the document. I get downvoted and called old every time I say this but Win 95/98 was peak UX. We are chasing aesthetics now instead of actual usability design. Marketing got too involved in how things looked, everything needs to be a customized, branded "experience" and it's causing severe learning curves vs. just following OS conventions and widgets where every app more or less looked and operated the same way. Where's all the UX designers and researchers? Oh right, we've laid them all off or just spent too many years not listening to what they had to say and letting the rent seeking marketing and accounting folks drive the products.

lucb1e 1y ago

I just tried going through the setup on a friend's work phone to try it out because it looked useful for my grandpa (he currently has a dumbphone due to eyesight issues, can't really use a touchscreen, but maybe this mode might work with big enough buttons and TTS) Issues: 1. It says "no results" if you look for "assi" in the settings. I wondered if this phone model doesn't support it, but ended up finding it manually near the bottom of the accessibility settings 2. The setup process is confusing, asking questions we don't know. E.g. need to confirm we know the "passcode" without saying what that is or having a field to try it out on. Does it mean lockscreen PIN? Then sure. We just pressed continue and hoped for the best. It also asks whether apps, that have been on the phone since forever, suddenly need a bunch of permissions. Will this mess with the friend's old settings outside of this special mode? We have no idea what was set and what to pick, e.g. does WhatsApp need contact access to work? Speech recognition? One of them even says "this is unexpected, please report this" How? Where? To what end? 3. Eventually got to the last screen and pressed the button for "Ok, we're ready now, enable!" and it pops up an error message: can't enable with the SIM PIN active, disable this in "settings" (ok which settings, where? Why not link it?) 4. Thankfully, this time we can find that in settings' search and... it's already disabled. I go back to assistive access and the error persists I literally can't get this set up... Edit: wanted to show the friend whose work phone this is the silliness of an error that says X and another screen saying the opposite. Now the SIM PIN shows up as enabled! So I pressed disable, they entered the PIN, and it gave another error message. But upon closing the screen, it showed as disabled again. Hoping it was real this time, went back to assistive access and now it could be enabled! Turns out... assistive access only works for the standard apps: Phone/dialer, SMS, camera, gallery, magnifier You can enable e.g. Google Maps but it has no idea that you're in assistive mode and shows you the normal UI. It also tells you to go and enable location access in settings, which you can't do in this mode. (I had enabled precise location during the setup of assistive access, but apparently it's broken.) This does have TTS for the SMS messages, that's nice, but he'd not be able to answer them and have a conversation anyway The magnifier is too jittery to be useful (his dumbphone has the same feature and issue) Going back out of assistive access mode, it seems the new app permission levels persisted outside this mode and some things are messed up now (whatsapp complaining it is missing access, for example) TL;DR same functionality as the 60€ dumbphone / flip phone my grandpa has, except (pro) you also get SMS TTS, (con) it's all non-tactile buttons, and (con) you can't flip the phone open to unlock the screen or accept a call. Especially that last one turned out to be really easy for the two grandparents that can't use a smartphone (one with visual, one with mental impairments). I'd recommend saving 500€ and going for the more accessible option instead

layer8 1y ago

It’s also very limiting, though. You can’t even zoom into photos, which elders with bad eyesight like to do.

bunderbunder 1y ago
For that you need to use screen magnification. Triple tap with three fingers to zoom in and zoom out. While you're zoomed, drag with three fingers to pan the view. But I also kinda feel like just saying that says a lot about Apple's UX these days, especially in the accessibility department. Because those swipe gestures can be confusing and require too much manual dexterity for many people who need a feature like screen magnification.
- layer8 1y ago
  > Triple tap with three fingers Honestly, that’s a non-starter.
- everybodyknows 1y ago
  Re the other reply here, what's missing is discoverability -- at minimum a little circled letter "i" in the corner that would pop up a big sketch of the required gesture.
  - layer8 1y ago
    Discoverability is important, but elderly people are unlikely to be able to reliably (or at all) triple-tap with three fingers, regardless of discoverability. Many already have problems with double-pressing buttons (like for Apple Pay).