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Logo showing Blind Sanity in Braille
Writer's pictureFabrice R

From iPhone to Android : Accessibility Part 2 - First Boot

It just doesn't make sense...

So you got the phone of your dreams or at least a vital part of your everyday life as a low vision individual and what you need to do once you receive it ,,, call a friend to set it up for you. Why ?

Because iPhone and Androids phones are not designed for accessibility out of the box. Oh yes ! It is great once it is setup correctly so why not out of the box ?

No matter what phone you are dealing with, you will always see the same flaws:

- Dim screen with even worse... ambient dimming

- No way to invert screen

- Small text size

- No VoiceOver or TalkBack.

Worse ! Both phones offer an accessibility option at first boot out of the box but make it hard to find and activate. What is the point ?

Well there is a reason for that... Manufacturers wants to make the first boot experience looks magical and big ugly font on a black background with a robot voice talking to you when you first start your phone is just too ugly. So,, screw accessibility at first ! Those blind people will figure something up ! They are a minority anyway !

It shouldn't take too many engineers to find a way to switch the phone to a special accessibility mode at first boot if needed.

But no... we have to call friend

Both phones fail miserably here but Android more than iPhone .

iPhone at least gets some limited voice assistance assuming you can find the menu to activate it. Android accessibility menu at first boot is very limited... no brightness toggle ... basically all you get is font size and other not so useful accessibility features.

If you move from an older iPhone to a new one, apple makes it simpler to transfer all your settings by getting the two phones close to each other but you will still need your friend to do that.

And things get from bad to worse when you start your setup process. That's in part 3 coming out tomorrow.

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