I recently read with interest Thrillist’s tech article Why you should ditch Google Maps for Apple Maps. Mostly, I read with interest because the New York-based writer’s experience — and his reasons for ditching Google Maps — didn’t remotely tally with my own.

Among other things, he argued Apple’s public transport directions are “infinitely better than Google Maps”, search is faster and more specific than Google’s, you get a 3D satellite view of your city, and you can access up-to-the-minute train arrival times.

All of this might be true in New York. Elsewhere, it’s often a different story. Here in the UK, I’ve found Apple Maps has fairly poor intelligence when it comes to points of interest (or, indeed, often even searching for cities and towns), and little knowledge of public transport that doesn’t include London. Also, 3D satellite views of capital cities are a fun toy, but Street View (which Apple Maps currently lacks a direct equivalent of) has for me proven practical when checking out an upcoming journey and looking out for landmarks.

The point isn’t that Thrillist got it wrong. For some people, I’m sure Apple Maps is an excellent product, and one that enables you to avoid Google’s app if having anything to do with Google on your iPhone irks. But the article showcases a problem that’s especially prevalent in tech: forgetting that the rest of the world won’t necessarily have the same experience as you.

I’m sure I’ve been guilty of doing the same at times. I’ve certainly written enough tech articles over the past 15 years to practically guarantee that at some point I’ve written more from my own standpoint than empathising with a wider audience. But these stories when they arrive showcase a need for writers (and their writing) to be better, and to recognise their experience isn’t ubiquitous.

Late last week, I received this cheery email:

Nook is dead in the UK, and customers who bought books thinking they might actually own them are now being told they might be able to still access some of them once the Nook store implodes, due to a partnership with “award-winning Sainsbury’s Entertainment on Demand”.

First, which awards? The Sainsbury’s On-Demand Digital Entertainment Brands Run by Sainsbury’s Awards? I was only vaguely aware Sainsbury’s did this sort of thing at all, let alone had won awards for it.

Secondly, this again goes to show that when you’re buying an awful lot of digital content, you should consider doing so nothing more than a temporary rental, even if (and this is the bad bit) you’re not flinging money at streaming. That is, frankly, not good enough.

Thirdly, this again showcases how DRM merrily punches in the face consumers who try to do the right thing. If you spent money on Nook books, chances are you’ll lose at least some of them now. Had you torrented those books, you’d still have copies. And in the UK, you can’t just legally strip the DRM and make your own copies; it’s illegal to breach DRM, with only (minor) exceptions being made for people with disabilities who have no other way to access the content in question.

You should not get a worse user experience on paying for something, but that’s increasingly the case. Music, at least, has been freed up somewhat, with purchases now typically being DRM-free across the industry. Some comics companies (such as 2000 AD) make a point of being DRM-free across platforms. But this is still rare. More often than not, any digital movie, TV show, comic or book you buy is wrapped in DRM, blocking portability and permanence.

Purchasing digital shouldn’t be a glorified extended rental. It’s no wonder many people now opt out of paying for media at all.

If you’re not from the UK, you might be unaware the Conservative Party is currently fighting a reckless proxy war for the leadership, with the UK’s membership of the EU being the battlefield. We can look forward to four months of campaigning, outright falsehoods, and attempts by both sides to skew and spin stories to their advantage. One today, however, was eye-opening in attempts at ‘balance’, both by campaigners and news outlets.

On the BBC’s report, EU exit would risk jobs, says group of business bosses, the following is stated:

Leaving the European Union would threaten jobs and put the UK’s economy at risk, leaders of some of Britain’s biggest companies have said. […] In a move described by No 10 as “unprecedented”, chairmen or chief executives of 36 FTSE 100 companies signed the letter, organised by Stronger in Europe and Downing Street, backing the campaign to stay in the EU, including Burberry, BAE Systems and EasyJet.

So 36 FTSE 100 companies are arguing already that the UK quitting the EU would deter investment in an already shaky UK economy. That should be terrifying to most people. Perhaps predictably, ‘balance’ was found:

Leave campaigners point out two-thirds of FTSE 100 firms, including Tesco and Sainsbury, did not back the letter.

This is true, but the inference here by those who want out is clearly that the majority is somehow not in favour. However, that’s not the case. What we currently have is 36 per cent saying “don’t leave, you idiots” and 64 per cent saying nothing at all. If even half of those companies sign a letter saying “leave the EU”, fair enough. But until then, the ‘score’ for those keeping count in this particular match is 36-nil, not 36-64.

On February 15, 2016, Stephen Fry left Twitter. It’s not the first time he’s done so, but it may well be the last. This time, the trigger was largely a joke he made at the BAFTAs about a friend, which resulted in the usual stream of bile being hosed in his direction from righteous keyboard warriors.

I don’t doubt some of them had a point. But I also don’t doubt many of them — probably the vast majority — didn’t think before they typed. Perhaps their comment was a knee-jerk reaction. Maybe they thought it was funny to have a go at a celebrity. In all likelihood, though, distance from another human emboldened them, and with the pile-on continuing, Fry decided enough was enough.

Later, Fry outlined on his blog his reasoning for quitting. He likened early Twitter to a kind of idyllic glade of sunshine and roses, which has now become a stagnant cesspool. Neither description is entirely accurate, of course. Early Twitter had its fair share of nastiness, and current Twitter in many ways remains amazing.

But even I as a niche tech journo, reasonably well known only in certain very specific fields, have felt the way in which online communications have changed. The ferocity of negative online comments on articles I’ve written has increased, as has hand-waving “I don’t believe you” idiocy, not least when I write about accessibility. I am, somehow, both an Apple zealot and an Apple hater. On Twitter, I occasionally get random horrible comments, which markedly increase in number whenever I dare to reply to one of the feminist writers and developers I occasionally converse with. Now and again, I even find horrible comments lurking in the approval queue on this blog, which has literally several regular readers.

For celebrities and other far more followed commentators who dare to allow the public some measure of access to them, it’s hard to imagine what they go through on a daily basis. I’ve assisted some over the years, when they openly asked for tech help. Their feeds were immediately packed full of dumb comments along the lines of: “APPLE IS RUBISH YOU IDIOT ISHEEP YOU SHOUD BUY ANDROID LOL”. Literally hundreds of tweets almost instantaneously appearing with the same ‘joke’. It’s astonishing anyone in such a situation manages to sort genuine communications from the noise. And it made me wonder why anyone would put up with this kind of thing for any length of time.

Clearly, for many, the positives outweigh the negatives. I see people with varying degrees and kinds of fame generously offering a little more of themselves, even as they’re in a spotlight that results in them being followed by a mob that can turn on a dime. I used to be slightly envious of such numbers. Not so much now. I’m grateful for the people who read my words, but in no hurry to end up in a position where I’m deluged by angry responses to everything I might share online.

But if I may, I would like to make one suggestion: that we all pause a little, far more often. As that great xkcd cartoon noted, there’s that sense people are all too keen to spend their time righting perceived wrongs online. The screen is little more than a shield, and anonymity too often a weapon. So whether you’re about to respond to someone online with millions of Twitter followers or just ten, or someone on Facebook you’ve never heard of, ask yourself whether you really need to. And if you do, ask yourself if what you’re typing is something you’d be willing to say face-to-face. And even if that’s the case, ask yourself if you’re being spiteful, cruel or unfriendly and whether it’s really necessary that we have any more of that kind of thing in the world.

I’m starting to feel like Apple has a vendetta against anyone with a vestibular disorder. Since OS X Lion, we’ve increasingly seen aggressive animations added to Apple’s desktop OS that can trigger dizziness, motion sickness, vertigo and related symptoms. These include slide transitions when moving between full-screen apps, the ‘morphing’ animation to and from full-screen apps, the slide between Launchpad pages, and entry/exit zooms for Mission Control. iOS 7 then introduced similar animations, along with parallax effects that made people ill. And now tvOS has followed suit.

iOS at least helped users, in providing a Reduce Motion option in the Accessibility section within Settings. Within six months, most of the worst animations were possible to replace with non-aggressive crossfades, much to the relief of vestibular disorder sufferers worldwide. But we’ve seen no such progress on OS X, and tvOS recently appeared with a ‘Reduce Motion’ setting so ineffective that it may as well have played a little sniggering noise when activated.

On the desktop, I’ve now, grudgingly, updated my main work Mac to OS X El Capitan. I’m not having fun.

The main reason is El Capitan kills the one remaining workaround I had that enabled me to safely use full-screen apps. System Integrity Protection, while essential to the security of the Mac, more or less kills off applications that inject code into OS X. TotalSpaces2 is one of them. The app was designed to manage desktops in a manner akin to those in OS X 10.6, but, importantly, included settings to customise transitions.

In other words, instead of getting a full-screen slide when switching full-screen apps or spaces, you could get a spinning cube or some other nutty animation. Or, mercifully, you could replace the animation with nothing at all. This is the sole reason I installed TotalSpaces2. No longer was I made dizzy by OS X’s aggressive default animations — something that could leave me groggy and feeling ill for an hour or even until going to sleep at night. And this isn’t just me — such issues are increasingly common, most likely because of the rapid adoption in the use of animation within desktop and mobile operating systems.

Because of Apple’s changes in OS X, I must now choose between the security of my Mac (turn off SIP and TotalSpaces2 will run) and my well-being; and I assume that in the long run, there won’t even be a choice, given that TotalSpaces2 is no longer a viable commercial product. I’ve long hunted for Terminal commands to disable the full-screen app animations in OS X, but it appears none exist. (Launchpad and Mission Control can be stripped of most animation. Commands for spaces were removed in OS X Lion. Reportedly, Apple engineers responded to a bug report by stating there was nothing to fix. This is technically accurate — Terminal commands are not user-facing. But it removed the one remaining avenue for users to tame a part of the OS adversely affecting their health.)

I also recently discovered an issue with window manager Moom, where windows wouldn’t snap, but would instead skid around the display, triggering motion sickness. It turns out other window managers are affected, and the trigger is activating text-to-speech. Just another OS X bug, presumably, but one that results in a very nasty surprise for anyone with a vestibular disorder. (The rough sequence of events: select text; read back text; don’t realise OS X has thrown a wobbly; attempt to snap window; watch it slide across the screen; end up dizzy for the next hour or more.)

The second of those examples is forgivable (and, I hope, will be fixed). It’s a niche and weird bug that likely won’t affect too many people. But the former absolutely isn’t. To be clear, though, I’m not blaming System Integrity Protection, which is necessary. I’m simply blaming Apple for doing almost nothing in OS X to help people with vestibular disorders.

Full-screen slide animations made their debut in OS X Lion, back in 2011. Since then, we’ve had OS X Mountain Lion, OS X Mavericks, OS X Yosemite and OS X El Capitan. In all that time, and all those revisions, there has been precisely one attempt I’m aware of in OS X to assist anyone with vestibular disorders: a Reduce Motion setting being added to the Photos app. It’s, sadly, largely ineffective, however.

This leads me to believe at least one of the following must be true:

• Apple doesn’t care about people with vestibular disorders. Accessibility increasingly means aiding those with poor/no vision, and occasionally people with hearing and motor issues. It doesn’t, in Apple’s view, mean making its software suitable for everyone.
• Apple is ignorant of vestibular disorders, despite people like me banging on about them like a broken record for the past four years. It doesn’t have enough relevant in-house knowledge, and so does nothing.
• Apple is fully aware of these issues, but doesn’t consider them enough of a priority to even add a single Reduce Motion switch to OS X in the fourth major update to its desktop OS since the problems appeared and were flagged. This despite many millions of people having related conditions.

None of these is particularly appealing, and I increasingly feel like I’m screaming into the void. There is, as already noted, an exception: iOS. There, it seems the team has fully taken on board much of the advice people have given and, most importantly, acted on it. iOS 7’s problematic animations were eventually mostly dealt with through Reduce Motion (a few outliers remain), and new features are eventually tamed to the point they’re at least more usable (such as the new app switcher). But elsewhere, Apple’s efforts in this area of accessibility are dismal and the company must do better. Whether it will is another matter — and I’m increasingly getting to the point where I feel like nothing is going to change.

Contact Apple about accessibility issues

To report accessibility problems to Apple, you can email accessibility@apple.com.

Further reading:

• OS X Lion and motion sickness from full-screen animations and transitions (Revert to Saved, February 2011)
• An open letter to Apple about motion sickness triggers in OS X Mavericks and iOS 7
• iOS 7’s motion effects are triggering vertigo and nausea symptoms (Stuff.tv, September 2013)
• Why iOS 7 is making some users sick (Guardian, 2013)
• How Apple’s iOS 7.1 finally quelled users’ motion sickness (March 2014)
• Apple, motion sickness triggers and OS X Yosemite — Why Apple should bring Reduce Motion ‘back to the Mac’ (Revert to Saved, June 2014)
• Access all areas — why even Apple needs to rethink regarding accessibility (February 2015, reprinted from MacUser)
• Apple and balance/motion accessibility — yelling into the wind
• Why Apple’s next operating systems are already making users sick (Alphr, June 2015)

Kirk McElhearn has also responded to this article with additions of his own, complaining about issues relating to font size and contrast, and how developers don’t think about accessibility issues nearly enough.

Rob Griffiths posts on Many Tricks about workarounds we figured out for Moom (which may also work with other window managers).