An open letter to Apple on the french blog Oxyytude

so this letter, VoiceOver reads the English translation in French. it would be helpful if the author of this post says what this letter is, so we can decide if we want to read it. just because it is addressed to apple executives doesn't mean it concerns accessibility, which is the primary focus of AppleVis. a general idea is required to get community interest.

thanks for the tip. as a beta tester, this will aid in my bug reporting.

I quote from the letter:

"For instance, in macOS, VoiceOver Quick Nav has been broken since the release of macOS 15. This bug has been reported on multiple occasions, but has never been fixed. For over 18 months, no correction has been issued. Is this acceptable?"

Great job guys. "Hi we're Apple Accessibility, what seems to be your problem"?

"It's broken! The quick nav is broken for all of the months now"!

OK, yeah. *Very* informative. Apple will get right on fixing your vagueness.

Dear Apple People!

It like doesn't work and other bad stuff like that! Why do you hate us because we're beautiful?

I know what you're going to say, so let me address this right now and head it off, like that's going to happen.

Khomus, you are going to say, all Apple has to do is go look at the thirteen years of feedback we've all submitted! To which I will say, yeah, not how this works. Your open letter should contain clear examples, e.g. French synths don't pronounce large numbers, obviously that's in the letter which is good so far, and why they're a problem, we seem to be missing that part.

The CEO doesn't even know what quick nav is. That's not because the CEO doesn't care about blind people either. It's because it's not their job to know what that is. This is no different than their not being familiar with, say, the web development features in Safari. That's because, in both cases, it's something they've probably never used, and they may never have the occasion to do so.

The leadership is running a giant company. It's not their responsibility to know intimate details of multiple operating systems. But sure. Hit them with "braille is a chaotic mess". They will instantly grasp your meaning. If they don't, they'll instantly pass it on to the accessibility team, who will instantly grasp your meaning, and fix it in a week. Because braille is so chaotic totes describes an actual problem that can easily be evaluated and remedied.

Also my sound thingy is making a weird noise. Somebody tell me how to fix it, now! This is intolerable! I do the thing and it does the thing but not the thing I want it to!

it's one perspective, and one i do not share.

It's understandable only by us because we have an insider perspective, and even then opinions and how person a do things can completely change the description. It, quite frankly, is a good start, but misses the mark. Speaking of example, why iphone mirroring was not mentioned at all?
This is my main problem with such things, for macos in particulare. This is obviously written by a person who knows and lives accessibility, but who's not a dev. I hate to say this, but what we'd rather need is the blind developers out there who know both accessibility at apple and code (I'm just a student, hardly know the latter currently :) ) only those can write truly valuable and much much longer such letters. Heck even David Goodwin's message around October 2023 was much more precise than this, and it went on hacker news. This could never go that far I think.

You do need to be able to be specific though, even if it's with only one example as a demonstration. "Braille is a chaotic mess" doesn't tell me anything, except that you have a bad opinion of braille functionality.

Braille is a chaotic mess. For instance, on iOS 26.2, using a braille display, it is only possible to navigate by word in a text entry field. This makes editing impossible.

Here, in my hypothetical, we're giving an example that stands in for all of the other potential issues one might want to ask about, if there's a followup. Plus, we have:

1. A specific issue.
2. Why that issue is a problem.

Suppose there's a way to work around the issue? Then we could add:

3. The workaround.
4. Why this still means it's a problem, e.g. the workaround makes editing take five minutes, when it could take one minute.

In both cases, we have a definite issue, and an explanation of why it's an issue, which means it's something a dev team could take action on. You don't need to be a dev to do this. You do maybe need to settle down and not write posts in a frothing rage of frustration. That's not judgment. I've done it. I've done it recently. That doesn't mean it's a good thing to do, especially in cases like this. It may be emotionally satisfying, but in general, it's not really all that helpful.

Saying my computer's broken isn't helpful. *How* is it broken? Will it not boot at all? Does it shut down every twenty minutes like clockwork? Is smoke coming out of it? Does it play your least favorite song on a continuous loop and you can't make it stop?

All of these problems likely have very different solutions. You need to know what's going on before you can do something about it. Just saying it's broken tells me you think there's a problem with it. It doesn't tell me what that problem is. You could be wrong, it could be doing exactly what it's supposed to be doing, and you just don't like that because you think it should do something else.

Yeah you're right,but I really feel that VO on amc is so broken that people need to be ultra specific with no hope to ever be listened. IE: browser engine, accessibility events (if any) not that I am able to do this myself but I have enough knowledge of html and js and how screen readers work under the hood to infer a lot and generally be right.