Yeah, sorry about that link-bait title, but I figured I’d best get in on the current wave of tech stupid before my tech journo credentials are snatched away from me. Mind you, perhaps escaping would be a smart move while the majority of the industry loses its collective mind.

I mentioned tech writers tending towards bile last week, but the latest stick to smack Apple with appears to be the accusation that the company has lost focus and no longer understands the value of simplicity.

Jason Hiner’s piece for ZDNet is fairly typical of this latest raft of Apple Watch moanery, calling it “too ambitious” and “a bit of a mess”. He argues:

the fact that Apple released the product in its current form says something. In fact, it says a lot about Apple under the new leadership regime because it’s the first new product category of the Cook-Ive era. And as far as innovation and discipline goes, this is a wobbly start.

His core complaint seemingly revolves around a belief that all Apple products start out simple and then layer greater functionality as they evolve. He’s right that Apple builds on products (notably software, adding richer features) over time, but what is simple?

For Apple Watch, Hiner complains that the device tries to do too much and that there are a load of new functions for a user to figure out, which are

unlike any other Apple or tech product so they aren’t naturally intuitive.

But what is intuitive? What is fully natural? My dad recently admitted to me he’d never used copy and paste, and he’s been using Macs for well over a decade. He’d just been dragging selections around, muddling through. With Watch, you imagine quite a few people will do something similar, perhaps chancing across functionality. Others will dig deeper. But the point is that many pieces of functionality that tech pundits consider simple and natural are only so to them because they use these things every day.

Consider the mouse and the original Mac. Back then, the windows/icons/mouse/pointer interface wasn’t unique, but it certainly wasn’t commonplace. Then there’s the iPhone, with its gestural interface that had a fair number of elements that felt natural, but also elements users had to learn, in order to access all of the device’s functionality.

Of course, people slammed those things too, saying they’d fail, because that’s what you do with Apple. And perhaps Apple Watch will be a faceplant, but I think the tech industry would be a better place if writers actually started to spend a bit of time with kit before deciding that it was a waste of time, a mess, or too ambitious. (And you can bet that had Apple released a much more locked-down Watch, with a razor-sharp focus and far fewer functions, ZDNet would have been whining about Apple’s closed nature, and how the device was a rip-off for the few things it enabled you to do.)

Barry Collins has written a piece for Expert Reviews on Björk’s reluctance to release her new music on Spotify. She says it simply doesn’t feel right to essentially give away something you’ve spent years working on. It’s a point of view that aligns with my own, and while revenue from streaming services is better than nothing, there are plenty of reports online that showcase how little bands and artists actually receive from the likes of Spotify.

Naturally, Spotify itself was bullish in response. CEO Daniel Ek argued:

We’ve already paid more than $2 billion in royalties to the music industry and if that money is not flowing to the creative community in a timely and transparent way, that’s a big problem

So it’s the fault of the labels in not getting money to artists, apparently. But what stood out to me more is the figure. Apple plays this trick too: talk about the BILLIONS that have been paid out, but entirely remove the context. A billion sounds like a lot when you’re talking about US dollars, Sterling or Euros. To the individual, a billion is a lot. But when that amount is divided up among every artist or developer on a service, across the entire amount of time the service has been running, a swift bit of maths leads you to a very different conclusion.

The recent Flipboard discussion and my ongoing issues with OS X Yosemite and accessibility brought to mind a piece I wrote for the dearly departed MacUser last year. It’s still very relevant (sadly), in part relating to major accessibility issues I’ve been writing to Apple’s accessibility team about since 2012, and so I’m republishing it here.

Apple might be a tech champion when it comes to accessibility, but it still has blind spots and a propensity to frustrate by using accessibility settings as a fix for contentious design

Perhaps the most laudable goal throughout Apple’s history has been a desire to make its products accessible to everyone who wants to use them. A combination of technological leaps and advancements in understanding wider user needs has resulted in astonishing accessibility controls lurking at the heart of OS X and iOS. Chances are, if you’ve poor vision, hearing or motor control, you’ll still be able to use Apple’s products. Given that you interact with an iPhone by pawing at a pane of glass, it’s quite something you can do so even if you’re unable to see the interface.

But for all of Apple’s success in terms of accessibility, the company still has work to do. It stubbornly retains an odd and frustrating tendency to erect barriers that make the going tougher than it needs to be for many users. It’s unclear why this is the case, but recent changes to iOS and OS X suggest a combination of ignorance and arrogance.

With iOS, Apple created a mobile operating system second-to-none when it comes to accessibility. A quick glance at relevant options in the Settings app compared to the equivalents in vanilla Android show just how far ahead Apple is. And yet when iOS 7 appeared, many users found it made them feel sick and dizzy, because of excessive zooming and swiping animations that could not be disabled; others complained of headaches, due to the brighter, starker interface.

On OS X, similar balance/motion concerns have existed since OS X Lion, and elsewhere the ‘iOSification’ of OS X has introduced further problems: ditching scroll bar arrows has made things tough for some people with motor issues; the upcoming OS X Yosemite includes transparency that dramatically reduces contrast for many interface components, bringing to mind ‘trendy’ (i.e. unreadable) grey-on-grey early-2000s web design; and several updated apps boast toolbars with tiny hit areas, meaning they can only be dragged if you have the dexterity to precisely aim and grab.

But perhaps the most disturbing trend is Apple’s inclination to seemingly use accessibility settings as a kind of band-aid for questionable and divisive design decisions. Not happy about iOS using a spindly font? Change that in accessibility! Hate the fact you can barely read menu items in OS X Yosemite’s dark mode? Change that in accessibility! And so on.

It’s hard to argue Apple should adjust the default state of everything that could potentially reduce accessibility. The swooping, zoomy nature of iOS 7 provides a sense of place if it doesn’t make you throw up, and Yosemite’s revamp has generally gone down very well (at least with anyone who’s forgotten about Mac users laughing at Windows Vista’s transparency seven years ago).

However, if Apple won’t make smarter design decisions and avoid giving into the temptation to sometimes push the shiny over the usable, it should make the means to adjust irksome pain-points more readily available and not bury them in a System Preferences pane or Settings section relatively few people are aware of. For remaining issues, Apple must be faster to address concerns. It’s great iOS now boasts a ‘Reduce Motion’ option, but unacceptable OS X doesn’t after several major revisions, nor properly old-school scroll-bars for those who truly need them.

If accessibility is a checklist, Apple still ticks more boxes than most, but the list is huge, and some of Apple’s nagging reminders date back to 2011. It’s time ‘access for all’ really meant that, especially when the changes would barely affect the majority yet improve the OS X and iOS experience for many thousands of people beyond measure.

Faruk Ateş was one of several designers to tear into the new Flipboard website, which throws accessibility under the bus, in order to offer a more fluid app-like experience online. On Daring Fireball, John Gruber essentially defended the move:

I’ve been a proponent of accessibility for as long as I can remember. It does not follow, however, that what Flipboard chose to do is wrong.

It is true that Flipboard’s engineering decisions prioritize animation and scrolling performance above accessibility. That’s no secret — the title of their how-we-build-this post was “60 FPS on the Mobile Web”. It does not mean they don’t care about accessibility. My understanding is that accessibility is coming — they’re working on it, but it isn’t ready yet.

John’s a smart guy, but I think he’s got this wrong. Accessibility shouldn’t be something a company ‘works on’, trying to figure out how to retro-fit it to a flashy new solution. It should just exist from day one. It’s absurd that Flipboard, a tool for reading, is now no more accessible to blind people than a Flash website would have once been. That’s not progress — that’s regression.

I recently penned a piece for Stuff on Internet Arcade, a part of non-profit site Internet Archive, designed to provide universal access to all manner of digitised content. Internet Arcade is essentially a version of MAME running in a browser, enabling you to play a bunch of classic arcade titles.

At the time I wrote the piece, about 900 games were available. Shortly after my article went live (a few weeks later, due to holiday scheduling), someone helpfully emailed me to say Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles had been removed from the site, due to a takedown request. I checked through the remaining items just now, and several more I selected have gone. The overall number of titles available, last I looked, was 649.

It’s understandable that IP owners get twitchy with online content such as this, and I’m generally against IP infringement myself. But I can’t help thinking there are differences in the way we experience media and the manner in which lawyers might be able to respond to various kinds of infringements.

Clever though it is, Internet Arcade isn’t the best way to experience these old games; at the most, it’s a reminder of a title you once loved, and a fun way to waste a few minutes during a lunchtime. When I was researching the article, it also reminded me once again of how much I enjoyed specific old games. The net result with me was that I fancied hunting down versions of said titles that would run on my current hardware—legally.

Perhaps that makes me an outlier. As I’ve written elsewhere, we live in an age where younger generations have only grown up with immediate and free access to all content, and so many don’t feel compelled to pay for anything. But I also see organisations making great use of the internet and benefitting from making content freely available: musicians upload entire albums on Soundcloud and report a subsequent uptick in sales; the likes of Image offer comics for peanuts on Humble Bundle and say the knock-on effect has been more people buying new issues of said titles.

I can’t help but think Internet Arcade is something that companies might consider nurturing rather than taking down, if not for the historical aspect—ensuring games of cultural significance remain available to all—then at least as a clever interactive ‘advert’ for when these games appear on commercial services elsewhere.