As regular readers will know, I’ve been writing about Apple and balance accessibility for a couple of years now. Ever since I first realised OS X Lion’s full-screen transitions were making me dizzy, I’ve asked why Apple hasn’t done anything to cater for users with such problems. This was especially surprising given the company’s excellent work in vision, motor and hearing accessibility.

Everything came to a head with iOS 7, which led to me writing about the subject for Stuff and then The Guardian. With its latest mobile OS, Apple had ‘gamified’ the user interface. For many people, this provided an exciting animated experience, with a great sense of space in a virtual world. But for anyone with a balance disorder, the zooms, slides and bounces were too much, in some cases making the devices literally unusable. Several people told me they’d replaced their devices with models running iOS 6; many wrote to Apple, begging them for an off switch.

Such pleas were largely answered with Apple’s iOS 7.0.3 update, which I’ve today covered in a new article for Stuff. The update adjusts the Reduce Motion capabilities in the Accessibility section of the Settings app. Rather than just disabling parallax, it now also turns off some (not all) zoom effects, such as those that occur on opening or closing a home screen folder, or when launching or closing an app.

This is extremely welcome. People had asked me what sort of timescale I was hoping for regarding balance issues, and I generally said three-to-six months. Instead, this first major update arrived about a month after iOS 7, and judging by responses I’ve had on Twitter and elsewhere, it makes iOS devices usable for the majority of people who suffer from balance and related disorders.

I say first major update quite deliberately, on the basis I’m optimistic this will not be a full stop. My hope is that this is merely an initial step for iOS 7 and Apple regarding this area of accessibility and that other updates will be forthcoming. Here’s what I’d like to see in future versions of iOS 7:

More triggers addressed and made possible to disable

Zooms were the biggest, most widespread balance problem in iOS, but other triggers remain. Perhaps the most notable is the app switcher, with has a zoom-and-slide entry/exit animation and retains the subsequent zoom when selecting an app. Other triggers include full-screen slide transitions (which were also common in iOS 6 and earlier), bouncing UI elements (notably in Messages) and the Safari tab switcher.

Granular controls in Settings

With other fields of accessibility, you don’t just get a single switch. For example, people with limited vision aren’t forced to turn on every piece of vision-related accessibility in iOS—they can choose what they need. By comparison, Reduce Motion is currently all-or-nothing. If you’re fine with parallax but not zooms (or vice-versa), that’s too bad. Given the speed with which Apple responded, I think this is a suitable compromise for now, but I do hope future versions of iOS 7 will allow users to choose which types of animation they’d like disabled.

Developer hooks

I’ve spoken to a number of developers about balance accessibility, and without exception, all were keen on Apple providing the means to hook into user-definable settings. Right now, they must roll their own. Their hope: if someone turns on certain settings in Reduce Motion, related animations in their own apps would be disabled or altered accordingly.

My other hope is that Apple’s accessibility team starts addressing issues beyond iOS. The latest version of OS X, Mavericks, recently arrived and it does nothing to deal with the issue I first raised with Apple two major releases ago. Full-screen transitions on large screens are major vertigo triggers, placing an big part of OS X off limits to certain users, primarily for the sake of aesthetics. That the animations can be overridden by TotalSpaces shows the code for doing so must be lurking somewhere, and it can’t be too much to ask for Apple to add a section to System Preferences for this problem.

Still, for the first time since I started writing about this subject, I feel truly positive, rather than like I’m just yelling into the wind (albeit more recently yelling into the wind with plenty of support). iOS 7.0.3 proved that Apple can make changes to cater for users with vertigo and balance issues, and so here’s hoping for more over the coming months.

The sheer outrage was palpable across the internet today as iOS developer Tapbots announced a refreshed version of its Twitter client Tweetbot, and charged users for it. As The Verge pointed out:

Tweetbot 3 for iPhone gets a fresh new design, but at a price

That price was a shocking $2.99, enough, according to ‘back of an envelope’ calculations to feed a family of four for a month. It’s no wonder The Verge then continued:

Tweetbot 3’s new design will be controversial, but so will its price.

Everyone has reason to be disgusted. It’s a well known fact that iOS developers don’t have expenses and in fact survive solely on a diet of unicorns and Jony Ive’s tears, living in houses powered by rainbows. And if you’ve owned the old version of Tweetbot since its original release in August 2011, it will have so far cost you a penny a week, which is enough to stretch the budget of any typical consumer.

That Tapbots is now charging for an update shows how little the company thinks of its audience, and is entirely unacceptable. The only logical response is for everyone to smash their iPhones to pieces in a rage or, alternatively, whine on Twitter about how unfair it is to pay $2.99 for an app they’ll use daily for many months on a $500+ iPhone.

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.