Following my previous work on iOS 7 and balance/motion issues, I was asked to write about the subject for The Guardian. My article  Why iOS 7 is making some users sick talks to developers (one of whom suffers from motion sickness), vestibular disorder experts, and John Golding, professor of applied psychology at the University of Westminster. The article provides, I believe, a succinct and thorough overview of the problem and what Apple can do to fix it, and yet still there are doubters and naysayers. Therefore, I’d like to address a few comments I’ve been repeatedly receiving or seeing over the past week:

The Reduce Motion option fixes the problem. Actually, it does very little—it merely turns off the parallax effect on home screens, and not zooms/slide transitions. It does help some people but not others.

Not everyone with motion sickness is affected, and so those who claim they are must be lying. Nope. These disorders affect people very differently. Just because you can’t read in a car and yet iOS 7 doesn’t affect you, that doesn’t mean others will have the same experience. Also, just because you aren’t affected, that doesn’t mean countless others won’t be. Just be thankful—not a troll.

Screen-based motion/balance problems cannot happen because of small screens. This is something I’ve seen in the recent glut of US-based articles. If this were the case, no-one would be suffering. (My own theory is that devices are bright and tend to be used fairly close to your face, and so although peripheral vision exists to anchor you, the screen overrides that.)

The slide transitions were never a problem before, so they can’t be now. Actually, they always were, and they continue to be in Windows 8, Android and other operating systems. The problem with iOS 7 is the overall effect is worse. Also, Apple usually does better when it comes to accessibility. Here, it’s dropped the ball.

This story only exists because the press needs to bash Apple again and again. I don’t doubt there’s going to be an element of that. Apple stories get page views. An Apple problem gets more. But this is about accessibility and disability. I didn’t really care about the iPhone 4 antenna. It was a mild issue with a product that could be dealt with easily. I do care about people who are adversely affected by using their devices.

I’m some kind of Apple hater. This one’s particularly fun, because I’m usually accused of being an Apple fan-boy. If I’m a hater, that comes as quite a surprise, what with me being a contributor to a bunch of Mac mags and owning a reasonably diverse selection of Apple kit.

People are idiots for upgrading. Not everyone reads tech blogs. Almost no-one reads upgrade notes. Most people see an upgrade button and tap or click it without thinking. Importantly, even those who do might not have had any motion/balance problems before iOS 7. I knew what I was potentially letting myself in for, being a tech journo, although the end result was actually worse than I’d feared it would be—at least on the iPad. But I’d say a tech journo is rather more of an outlier than a typical consumer!

If you are having issues with iOS 7, please share the stories I’ve written, and write your own. Most importantly, tell Apple by emailing a succinct explanation of your problems to accessibility@apple.com, and request the means to disable relevant features.

If you’re not having issues with iOS 7, please just have a little empathy. I realise it’s hard to understand invisible conditions if you don’t suffer from them, but they are very real, and they affect many millions of people daily.

Apple has a problem with animation. In the past, I’ve written about how OS X’s full-screen animations and transitions gave me motion-sickness, leaving dizziness and nausea in their wake. ReSpaceApp/TotalSpaces was a partial solution, but only overrides full-screen slide transitions, and not other OS-level animation. I wrote directly to Apple execs and accessibility@apple.com; having (unsurprisingly) had no response from anyone, I then penned an open letter about motion sickness triggers in OS X Mavericks and iOS 7.

Within the last of those, I was at the time concerned about iOS 7. My fears weren’t unfounded. I’ve now updated my devices and have the same feeling I got on using OS X Lion’s full-screen for the first time. Right now, the iPhone is bearable, but aspects of the iPad are unusable. The app switcher in particular has such aggressive animation and zooming that a single use is enough to trigger dizziness.

I’m not alone. I found vestibular support organisations were hugely concerned about iOS 7. I’ve had many people email and tweet me about these issues, in some cases practically begging for a solution. There isn’t one. I’ve been told about 50 times now to activate ‘Reduce Motion’ in iOS 7, but all that does is remove the home screen parallax—it doesn’t stop the zooming and sliding elsewhere. Obviously, it also doesn’t ‘fix’ OS X for me and others either.

Worse, there’s some major ignorance within the market regarding vestibular conditions. On Friday, I wrote a news piece for Stuff.tv on iOS 7 triggering vertigo and nausea symptoms. This was well received by those suffering, but not by others. I’ve been called a “bullshitter” and a “pansy”; some people helpfully argued that I should “just fuck off and use Android then”, while others said I was “just another idiot finding something else Apple’s done to complain about”.

As someone who’s regularly accused of being an Apple shill, it’s curious I’m now considered the opposite. Also, there appears to be a misunderstanding regarding what people like me actually want. We don’t want to destroy your precious operating systems. We don’t even want to remove those dynamic zooms and swipes you love so much. We merely want a setting that will optionally enable you to do so. That’s it.

I’d like nothing more from Apple than to be able to go to the accessibility settings in OS X Mavericks and iOS 7 and see ‘disable animation effects’. For most people, this option existing won’t affect them. But for many people currently suffering various motion symptoms through standard device use, it will offer a level of delight like no other Apple update. For them, devices will suddenly become truly magical.

Further reading: Why Is Apple Ignoring People with Vision and Balance Problems? (Kirk McElhearn)

By me, over at Stuff.TV:

Trained to expect Microsoft’s level of market dominance during the height of the Windows era, every company now seemingly has to lose for one to win. So it goes with the iPhone 5C, set to launch on 10 September. The budget iPhone apparently spells doom for Android (because if Apple has a cheap phone, everyone will of course buy it at the exclusion of everything else) or possibly for Apple (because it’ll be a massive failure).

I explore how Apple thinks, the red-herring of market-share, profits, what the iPad mini means for the iPhone line, and the inevitability of what will happen after Apple reveals its new device on the 10th.

What the fuck? That was my initial reaction on being told earlier today about an article featuring ‘hot female web designers’. Amazingly, it gets worse. The full article title (no link, because) is “20 Hot Female Web Designers That Will Take Your Breath Away” and is either knowingly trawling the web as link bait or has a disconnect the size of the moon.

It begins:

Sizzling hot designs from hot female web designers will prove that, though web design industry has always been viewed as a world fully packed with men, the best stuff doesn’t always come from them!

Or how about: “Great work from women in the web industry proves that although the industry has long been seen as male-dominated, men definitely don’t create all the best work”?

Female web designers constantly battle to acquire the top spot in web design industry.

And then stupid blog posts screw them over by mentioning them for their physical characteristics rather than their work. Great!

though females are considered extinct in web designing

Extinct? Certainly not. But if they were, it would probably be through being killed off my an avalanche of stupid set off by a volcano of idiocy.

But first let me ask you to hold your breath.

OK. Holding.

To escape from the wrath of the male hot web designers and being accused of being a sexist,

No longer holding. Instead thinking of just how many things can be so wrong in so few words.

let me remind you that this article is made to uplift the spirits of young female web designers.

Nothing is more uplifting than being told you’re hot rather than, say, a great designer!

This is to show the little girls out there that web designing is not just a man’s world. To prove that [site name redacted] is equal in promoting both sexes in web design, feel free to read this post: 15 Most Influential People in Web Design.

Because men are influential but women are merely hot. Got it. (And, no, before you ask, not a single woman is on the influential list—after all, they’re just too hot and, apparently, not influential enough.)

Again: what the fuck?

Daring Fireball responds to Garrett Murray’s thoughts on the 2DS:

The biggest WTF aspect is the price — it’s only $40 cheaper than the regular 3DS.

Yeah, WTF? No other company would create very obvious upsell positioning for its products!

A pity Daring Fireball and various others seem to have decided balance is a bad thing regarding Nintendo, given Lukas Mathis’s Nintendo piece continuing to grow with more insight and facts. If you missed it, I also chimed in yesterday on why Nintendo should not start making iOS games—yet.

Update: For anyone arguing that the gap is bigger—the iPod touch upsell is $70, not $40—do bear in mind the iPod touch costs almost twice as much as Nintendo’s console.