Hi Everyone,
Would anyone here be interested in working with Apple Accessibility to set up monthly cadenced meetings to discuss the top most accessibility task-blocking issues for blind customers? Issues might include Safari busy, XCode and the ongoing unreliability of Braille support. I envision we would work with Sarah Herrlinger, Dean Hudson or someone similarly positioned within the company's accessibility team to have an accessibility engineer on each call. The call would then have a couple of people from Applevis to describe the month's issue, conduct a short demonstration with audio and screen sharing, then engage in a feedback session to discuss how we can move forward on the featured issue.
What do we all think?
Thanks,
Darrell
Comments
My thoughts on this matter
I think, in prinsapal, this is an amazing idea. However, Apple is traditionally a company of vale’s secrecy. I don’t think Apple would do this. They have feedback channals (accessibility@apple.com, apple.com/feedback, and for beta testers, both public and developer, the Feedback Assistant built-in to all apple platforms. It would be awesome to have such a call, and it would be amazing if Apple abliged us! Be prepared for the opasit!
I would love to see this.
I don't see this happening though. Apple is definitely secretive about what it does.
Keep Dreaming
This is a wonderful idea, and it would be great if Apple engaged with their customers, but the simple truth is they don't. If they do, it's in these extremely scripted environments where all they can talk about is how awesome they're doing. Don't you dare bring up concerns about VoiceOver stability, the fact your employees falsely advertised that the Mac Studio would work without a mouse, etc. That would be very! very! very! bad for our PR, and we won't allow that under any circumstances!
We Would be Asking Apple to Listen
Keep in mind we would be providing demonstrations of task-blocking bugs from a blind user's perspective, not necessarily asking Apple to provide any of their plans they may or may not have for doing anything about them.
Existing Relationship?
We seem to already have a working relationship with Sarah and Dean, so couldn't Applevis leadership at least ask them if they would be willing to participate in something like this, or to assign other employees to do so? All they could do is say no.