An open letter to Apple about motion sickness triggers in OS X Mavericks and iOS 7
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
Just wanted to let you know: the iPad’s Kindle app now features optional iBooks-style page-turn animation. You can switch it on from the pop-up Settings menu (semi-invisible cog symbol on the bottom-right of home screen).
@Coleman: Thanks—just tried it. Frustratingly, it doesn’t work with comics but it’s fine with prose books. Quite why you can’t just snap to each page as an option, I don’t know. (I did write to Amazon about this, but the cut-and-paste response I got from the answering drone was comical at best.)
Are you saying that all screen slides (the kind of spatial navigation cues that are so common on mobile devices) make you ill then?
That’s both a bugger, and something that had never occurred to me before!
@Russell: For me, it’s usually to do with how much of the view area is taken up by the animation. The iPhone is less of a problem because I can usually see around it, and so an eye/brain disconnect doesn’t happen. The other extreme is my 27-inch iMac, where the screen’s so large that the full-screen slides between desktops can make me feel sick. The iPad’s somewhere in-between. I’m usually OK switching apps there, but that might be because my fingers are partly blocking the view *and* giving the brain a visual cue regarding what’s going to happen (meaning everything follows the natural and expected direction of travel); by contrast, reading comics in Kindle can be quite a nasty experience if I’m not careful.
Hi Russell,
Forgive me if this is a stupid question, but if OSX is replete with such transitions, have you considered switching to Linux for your desktop computing? Linux’s front end is endlessly configurable.
Another question – does Windows’ metro-tile-sliding interface trigger the same feelings? Or have you tried using Windows 7? I don’t believe any Windows before version 8 utilised the types of transitions that you describe as problematic – and if they are, all animation is easily disabled in all Windows pre v8, iirc.
I hope you find a solution!
H.
@Hugo: The problem is a lot of my work is writing about Apple tech. Short of starting an entirely new career (not really an option right now), I can’t just bin the Macs and iOS devices and start afresh. Also, technology does my head in enough without fighting Linux. My Win 8 install does have similar transitions but I’ve not spent time rummaging around the options as yet, so I’ll take a look.
Thank you SO MUCH Craig for writing this open letter. I was gutted to hear of the additional animations in OS X Mavericks and iOS 7. Maybe we should have a chat?
@Marissa: Feel free to email me on craiggrannell@googlemail.com if you like.
«Also, technology does my head in enough without fighting Linux.»
Here you are assuming you have to “fight” in order to get Linux to work, which is quite wrong. Distributions like Ubuntu work out of the box (in some cases much more than Mac OS X which, for instance, requires you to buy drivers for getting write access to NTFS).
@Lazza: I have an Ubuntu build on a VM. The OS largely works out of the box, but there were still things I couldn’t easily do with it. Also, as already noted, unless I change my entire career and suddenly, magically get lots of work for Linux mags (without knowing a great deal about Linux), I’m kinda stuck anyway.