Accessibility and Apple: dizziness by a thousand cuts.
In which I try to explain the problems with Liquid Glass and the current Apple betas when it comes to vestibular conditions, outline how Apple responds to this kind of thing, and react to the three types of feedback I get when writing this kind of post.
https://reverttosaved.com/2025/07/13/accessibility-and-apple-dizziness-by-a-thousand-cuts/
@morrick Thanks re the article. And, yeah, it’s a frustratingly ignored area of accessibility. Ironically, I build the original Ménière's Society website back in the day, and drew their logo, and so learned a bunch about this stuff before it ended up affecting me.
Games are interesting. I *can* play first-person, *if* I am in control and the camera is stable. Mario Kart = fine. FPS where the camera has footstep bobs = nope. Playing Mario Odyssey as the hat: hell no.
@morrick Apple is passive but also inconsistent. Sometimes, it pushes back. Some responses I got from the macOS team a while back were just odd. tvOS doesn’t appear to care at all about this. But the iOS lot have mostly been good, and IPadOS to a similar degree.
I just wish this was all baked in. It should be foundational. And not just for Apple, but also for devs. Turn on Reduce Motion. Are the aggressive transitions calmed? if not, maybe do some extra work.
@morrick So on that side of things, I find settings do tend to stick during upgrades, but of course not across devices. However, Apple did at least (IIRC) roll in some motion reduction to its setup screens, which at one point were vestibular triggers(!!!), and Reduce Motion is now part of that on Mac at least.
More broadly, while I’m glad Accessibility has a section in Settings, those settings should be elsewhere in context too. A handful are, but more should be.
@cstrauber It lands better when enough people shout about it. And I’m grateful Charles Arthur commissioned that Guardian piece from my pitch years ago, because that resulted in wider awareness, including at Apple.
But it is a pity that all these years later, it’s still so often a fight to even wrestle operating systems and apps to a point where they’re just about usable in this space. But, hey, I’m not going to stop shouting, even if the replies I get sometimes suggest I should.
@cstrauber If you’re running betas and discover accessibility shortcomings, file feedback. Outside of the beta, accessibility at apple dot com is the address I’ve been using.
In all cases, I’ve found requests work best with very straightforward structure:
- OS
- What happens
- Why this is a problem
- Ideal behaviour
(Or expected behaviour with the last one, if you find a big, such as the zooming and flouts on iPadOS 26 when you tap back to the ‘desktop’.)
Craig Grannell
Shaun
Riccardo Mori
cstrauber