Dear Apple,

One of the most impressive things about your company is your inclusive stance when it comes to users. OS X and iOS alike both have plenty of options for the visually impaired, people with motor issues, and those who require other kinds of assistance when using technology.

Despite this, I worry a little about iOS 7, on the basis of my own problems with motion sickness. I’ve heard the parallax effect (a known trigger) can be disabled, but Charles Skoda has written about new motion-sickness triggers in Messages, and this on a system already packed full of large/full-screen transitions, which are also a big problem on OS X.

Perhaps this is down to pain points. Maybe no senior figure at Apple has similar problems or knows people who do. But every time I accidentally invoke full-screen on my iMac or forget to close my eyes during an iPad Kindle page transition (mercifully, iBooks uses a page-turn animation under iOS 6), I wish you could feel what I feel—that sense of nausea that knocks me for six and makes using a device or Mac anything but pleasurable. And then I wish you’d do something about it.

I should state for the record that I’m perfectly aware my problems aren’t life-threatening and aren’t nearly as serious as those that affect many, many other people. I’m certainly not comparing temporary dizziness and sickness to being blind, say; I’m not suggesting motion sickness is as severe as motor limitations that would limit someone to not being able to use a keyboard, mouse or touchscreen with any degree of precision. However, accessibility is fundamentally about catering to all, and by peppering your operating systems with so much animation that cannot be turned off, you continue to make things a little less magical for many people.

By default, I wouldn’t want anything to change, but it can’t be beyond the abilities of Apple engineers to provide settings that disable certain animations or switch them to something that’s not likely to trigger problems (crossfades rather than full-screen slides, for example); and like other aspects of accessibility, such controls would potentially benefit other users too, who for their own reasons would prefer a system without screens and panels sliding around.

Yours hopefully,

 

Craig Grannell

Further reading on this site

Why iOS 7 is making some users sick
What Apple should do regarding motion sickness triggers in OS X/iOS 7