Blind person using Apple products here, and at least for phones, I agree. I wouldn't say it's exclusively because of iPhone, but a large part of my independence is definitely it. There have been problems, bugs that go unfixed for years, MacOS VoiceOver is quite a disaster even though I do still use and enjoy the platform overall, and anything worth using can be criticized I think. But iOS has so many features built in that help me every single day. VoiceOver, but also all of the features utilizing vision like door detection, OCR, etc. they're in the magnifier as well so you don't need VoiceOver enabled to play with them, and I think a number of them also require a lidar sensor?

Anyway, my phone is such an important companion wherever I go that I keep several magsafe batteries on me whenever I leave the house for a significant time. It has made an absolutely huge difference in confidence. It is definitely one of the single most important assistive tech devices I have together with my computer.

The first time I saw a blind person using an iPhone, I was blown away. I follow some Apple engineers who work on accessibility, and they all seem very passionate about their work. It’s an area where I truly believe Apple is doing it to help people, not just for profit.

I’m not blind, but I’m using accessibility features like Speak Screen, and the text-to-speech is pretty poor (mispronunciations abound, markup is ignored, punctuation is misinterpreted), usability is poor (can’t start at a user-selected location on a page for example), and it’s rather buggy, especially within Safari. It’s been that way for years, and it doesn’t seem like anyone at Apple is interested in making it a better experience.

Just an aside, it's a ton of work to make accessibility work on anything other than the most native looking apps, as different settings will move the UI unexpectedly and creates a lot of issues to be taken care of because of the screen size and different layouts.

The screen speak for example, sometimes you have to manually make sure they speak in the right order because of UI elements are placed non-standard way like if you have a label as name, and one as phone number side by side, the speak may start going down vertically, and you have to fix it by grouping it or force it speak it manually. Small example.

I struggle not to have a cynical take these days. Of course he cared about the ROI. The ROI is access to an underserved market, a halo effect, a new community of adherents, a new reason for customers to cross the moat into the ecosystem… a modest investment with a durable long term return in multiple categories.

I appreciate that it’s a win-win for Apple and for its customers, and I firmly believe that accessibility features serve everyone eventually. I’m glad that there are some billionaires who also see it that way.

I guess I just wish we didn’t have to rely on rare cases of billionaires finding it in their own best interest to happen to serve the rest of us. Especially when the actual accessibility work and everything else is actually done by a whole class of people that never make headlines just for leaving their jobs and being replaced.