or, getting older sucks

Okay, as promised, I'm going to post a thing about my most favorite-est new iOS 18 feature. You see, as a kid, I prided myself on being able to read whole novels in the backseat of my parents' Grand Cherokee without getting sick at all – no Dramamine, nothin'. However, more recently, into my thirties, I've found that... to no longer be the case. If I play on my phone, or my Steam Deck on a long drive or subway ride, I will quickly find myself pretty sick to my stomach.

But, on my most recent long drive to visit some family in southern Utah, I was symptom-free, due to a new accessibility feature from Apple called Vehicle Motion Cues:

So, what you are seeing there on the left and right hand side of my screen are dots that sort of move opposite of the momentum of the car – turning right moves the dots left, slowing down moves the dots up. These dots appear automatically when iPhone detects you are in a moving car or train, and pretty reliably so, in my experience. The dots mimic the behavior of objects outside the car:

1. if you turn left, a tree on the side of the road will move to the right of your vision.
2. if you slow down, cars around you will seem to move forward.

To my perception, this really works, and makes a difference – my recent road trip was 3 or 4 hours long, and my dear wife took the wheel for a decent chunk of it, and I experienced no ill effects. Previously, looking up from the phone to the road was especially disorienting, as my phone screen's static frame of reference is immediately replaced by the motion of a car going around a bend or passing an object on the side of the road. Apple has an earned perception for excellence in accessibility, and features like this point to why.

the moral of the story

At the FRONT conference I attended last month, I heard a great talk from Payge Kerman, the director of product design at Weave, who judiciously pointed out that it is not hard to achieve a good level of accessibility. Simply, from day one, choose to:

1. Use color-blind friendly palettes (I checked 3 times that I was using the right "palette" there)
2. Enforce the use of alt-texts on images, diagrams, and charts
3. Ensure that buttons and controls are exposed in screen-reader-friendly ways
4. Utilize any number of tools to manually or automatically caption audio content.

I'm not going to dive deep on any of these, as all of them are eminently google-able, and are table-stakes was to assist those with dexterity, visual, or auditory differences.

What Apple is showing us is that there is merit in looking more deeply at how your software or product is used, learning about how such use can cause even moderate discomfort to people, and looking for innovative, clever ways to solve for that discomfort. Sometimes, as product folk, we tend to view accessibility as a checklist to ensure that our employers aren't exposed to lawsuits, etc. But Vehicle Motion Cues solves problems not covered by regulations like the ADA or what have you: it increases comfort in the use of their product.

What's more, it has a carry-on benefit (to Apple) of increasing device usage, at least in my case. On big travel days, I am now much more likely to continue using my device, rather than putting it away, for better or for worse!

Accessibility improves usability.