Sidebar to “iPhones are hard to use”
…where I mentioned that iPhone keyboards and keypads randomly change foreground and background colours (photos).
Here’s what my blind friend gave me to submit as a bug to Apple (radar 45620925).
To whom it may concern at the Mother Pod –
I recently purchased a beautiful, beautiful red iPhone 8. I bought this phone (and all previous Apple products) owing to my increasing comfort with iOS and, generally, its consideration of and utility for visually-impaired or low-vision people… of which I am one.
The unboxing was glorious and the setup was no more arduous than I had expected, with one very significant exception, which may have been my fault… though I honestly cannot imagine how (as such I will deal with as Nº 3).
I am contacting you to let you know about three points of dissatisfaction:
I noticed when I toggle between the two keypads (phone and voicemail) there was an inverse contrast. No matter what combination of brightness or Smart or Classic Invert I tried, I could see only one keypad easily. I had to use my phone, then pause to clumsily change the colour inversion in order to then check my voicemail. After a week of trying to figure it out myself as well as speaking to friends who are “super-users” I had given up and accepted this extraordinarily inconvenient reality as a sad fact, when out of simple D-F luck I stumbled across two buttons under General Settings → Accessibility → Increase Contrast → Darken Colours and Reduce Transparency, the second of which was what I seemed to be looking for… or at least, I suspect, resulted in a viable workaround.
There is absolutely no way I or anyone else I spoke to could reasonably be expected to know that reducing the transparency button would achieve the goal of having two separate contrast fields on those two keypads. This should be seen to. Why ever would the keypads be inverted in the first place? Senseless, confusing and extremely inconvenient.
Siri cannot access voicemail. I am told that it has to do with an inability to access specific carrier service, which is ball-wash to me. If she can access one keypad why not the other?? When I ask Siri if I have voicemail she says “You have no voicemails,” whether I do or not. What’s up with that? Am I doing something wrong in the setup or is that simply an annoying irregularity that you need to fix? Is there any way that I can actually have her check my voicemail?
When I plugged in my new phone to begin the initial setup the “Hello” screen was of an adequate brightness. Everything subsequent to that was so damn dark I was actually only able to stumble through it in VoiceOver. This is my third Apple setup and the first time that’s ever happened.
(Published 2018.10.28, but backdated so this posting would appear in readable sequence.)