Long back Xiaomi Phones used to have soemthing like this. That one feature was how I migrated my in-laws to Smartphones from their Nokias.
The key content from the article;
Here's how you set it up: Head into Settings, tap Accessibility, scroll down to the General section at the very bottom, and tap Assistive Access. Now, tap Set Up Assistive Access, then Continue. It will then ask you to select your preferred appearance: rows or a grid. I suggest choosing a grid. This is how you get those super-large tiles. Now the OS will ask you to select allowed apps—tap the green plus icon next to the apps you want to allow.
>children have quickly found workarounds for such measures, such as asking friends to message them links, which can bypass restrictions when opened
I was very surprised of this by my own kids find workarounds like l33t hackers. Apple's restrictions are a joke. The app store is full of things they can mess with. My daughter mentioned some way to get around screen time.
I found it such a hassle to keep locked down I gave up. Like, he'd be so aware that he'd find ways to watch me enter the PIN code when adjusting the settings. I'd have to be ever-vigilant and I got tired of it.
It seems like Apple put a big focus on 'kids mode' things this WWDC. To the point they dedicated a major section of the keynote to it. Hopefully a part of that will be focussed on the workarounds.
When I was a kid my parents wouldn’t give me a cellphone. I wanted to call my girlfriend. Well, really, my girlfriend wanted me to call her. A lot.
They didn’t give me one.
I ended up finding a way to get my own through a more apathetic adult who I could pay cash to cover my bill (only an extra $10/month on a family plan).
I certainly am not telling you to just cave in, but perhaps this story can be a reminder that technology you control is potentially better than technology you don’t.
What age groups are we talking here, because if we're talking about a 7 year old, giving them unfettered screen time is probably bad parenting. However if we are talking about someone old enough to have gf/bf its probably also bad parenting to not let them develop their own self control around technology. They have to be an adult eventually.
I was a teenager, if that wasn’t clear. But I was more of the mindset of lending a story, I can’t say whether or not it’s relevant to the parent commenter’s scenario.
I started my kid at 12 with an extremely locked down iPhone. She fights the restrictions at every turn and I have to make sure that she understands that finding loopholes is fun but also if I catch her violating the spirit of the restrictions there will be consequences. So she proudly tells me about clever workarounds she finds but still puts the phone away at the appropriate times. It’s kind of fun that she’s developing an instinct for subversion.
That’s how we handle it with ours as well. He found a way around a certain control and we opened a bug report with the vendor and it was acknowledged and fixed. He then realized he locked out other kids with that and laughed and tries to find more worth reporting.
We didn't give our kid her own phone until a few months past her 13th birthday. She was at a private elementary school since kindergarten and her class was small and mostly had the same kids from K-8, so the parents got to know each other early on and there was general agreement on 'no phones until 13'. This greatly reduced the "but so-and-so has one".
What's stopping them from getting a burner device anyway? Imposing too much control can push them away, but a lack of direction can also make them wander.
All you can do is nudge and try not to worry too much. It's certain there are other influences in their life you don't know about.
Don't apologise. Children end up sending pictures of themselves in their underwear to strangers all the time because 12 year olds panic when someone puts the screws on them. Their brains just work differently.
When my friend's kids were totally obsessed with League of Legends, I offered to set up a home firewall with increasingly difficult workarounds, so by the time they graduated high school they'd at least have a cybersecurity certificate and possibly a Ph.D in networking.
Australia was one of the first countries to institute social media bans under a certain age. Reading the reports and commentary from parents there has been fascinating, but not really surprising if you remember what it's like to be a kid.
The most positive thing I read was that the kids are spending less time on social media in front of adults (like at the dinner table) because they're not supposed to be on social media.
But most of the parents in the article I read believed their kids had circumvented the ban somehow. Their problem now was that the kids' social media use was entirely hidden from them and they had no way to monitor it or even bring it up with their kids. The kids didn't want to admit to using social media at all.
None of this should be very surprising for any of us who remember back into childhood. Circumventing the restrictions was a game with its own reward. I had friends who were finding ways to get around the school's internet controls for the fun of doing it, not because it blocked any sites they wanted to use.
The upside of well-crafted social media bans for kids under a certain age is that you can use them to apply financial pain to social media companies for failing to prevent kids from signing up.
I was definitely that kid. I remember discovering that my district's web filter had a default password (something like "changethis123"), by watching one substitute with exceptionally poor typing skills. Problem was, substitutes' accounts were disabled frequently, and any one account only really had a lifetime of a week or two, before someone in the IT department realized that 300 devices were connecting to the network with the same credentials.
But the staff lists were public, and I had the default password. So I set up a script to turn the lists of names of teachers, librarians, janitors, etc. into usernames, and then tried to login with all of them. Turns out, most support staff, especially custodians, hadn't changed their passwords. (I'm guessing their jobs didn't involve much computer use). With a list of a couple dozen working accounts, I'd mete out 1 or 2 at a time to my friends, and we had teacher-level access for the rest of our time there. Don't remember using it for much, maybe showing my friends a youtube video during lunch or something.
Usernames are almost always quasi public knowledge, even when they're not email addresses. The problem here was the existence of a default password, not the fact that you could figure out usernames.
As a late Gen X I grew up when the "it's 10pm do you know where your kids" are ad's ran. When "just say no" was all I heard for a decade. When sex ed was marginally controversial. Honestly, I remain shocked that I never got arrested for some of my shenanigans. The rest of it was drinking, drugs and partying.
I was candid with my kids about what I did in my youth, I was also honest with them about how terrible the tech was. They also got unfettered access to it (tech), and there were lots of conversations and consequences around its (mis)use.
Given the history of "abstinence only" sex ed, and "just say no" drug campaigns, and their massive failures; just not letting them have it seemed like it was going to create the problems that many are looking to avoid.
As they have moved into adulthood they have taken those lessons to heart, and are now the ones who complain about their peers and their abuses of social media and inability to self moderate. These same conversations continue now, with the added topic of AI -
You can lock them out of the app store completely, and only allow a list of approved domains that can browse to. I also had it shut everything down at 10pm so they couldn't spend all night trying to find workarounds. Worked really well, but it did require some work on my part to manage the installed apps and allowed domains though
Our school's library computers (mind you I was early 20s by then) did not allow people to just sit down and go online, an admin had to log in first.
We did have Notepad though. Notepad -> open file -> explorer -> enter URL -> internet explorer -> internets.
Not long after we both got an operating system installed on our removable drive (which we had to pay like 200+ euros for across four years and we barely used it), and bootable Linux CDs became a thing too so the protections were completely moot.
ScreenTime is for limiting and monitoring access to certain things for those who can otherwise handle a modern smartphone. Assistive Access is to remove the complexity for those who can't handle it. They are for different use cases, with some overlap in the venn diagram.
I've used MDM to make my iPhone dumb. It's great! I wish there was an easy way to publish my configuration so others could use it / adapt it, but it's a little involved because you have to wipe your phone the first time you set it up with configurator.
Supervised devices cannot be backed up and restored to supervised devices. You can only backup/restore to an unsupervised target. If you want supervision, you have to abandon your backup.
MDM is the worst part of iOS. It undermines all of apple’s security claims, basically making iOS windows. Devices should not be able to be remotely controlled.
MDM enables enterprises to control how the phones they own behave. If anything it makes it more secure, if an enterprise were to only allow allowlisted apps to run on it.
The only issue is BYOD via MDM (when it's not via "Work Profile"), which is somewhat scary from a user perspective, especially from how hard it is to tell what permissions they might be able to spring on you at any time.
I assume they can spy on anything, that's why I refuse to do any kind of BYOD that requires MDM enrollment. It's also one IT mistake away from wiping out my personal data from my own property.
Company's Outlook, Teams, MS Authenticator and Slack on my personal phone? Ehhhh fine.
The second IT requires a profile it's the second I'm uninstalling anything company related from my phone. They can give me a company phone, or I will only access work related things from their laptop.
Happened twice to me, one time I got a company phone, the other, computer only.
Nonsense. MDM is usually for devices owned by the company or opt in by you personally. There is no way to attack or transparently MDM a personal phone that I know of.
MDM is designed for corporate owned phone environments where there's a great many good reasons to lock down a phone. If you're handing out company owned phones to employees you want the ability to remotely lock/wipe, install and remove apps, set a number of restrictions. If people want to do anything else they are completely welcome to do it on their own personally owned property.
For instance I have recently seen a very successful Apple MDM deployment in a school environment where the teachers and staff have access to a great depth and breadth of PII of a thousand children under age 16. You don't want all those phones to become a free-for-all of people doing whatever they want.
I got an iPad 2 found in a drawer that would be perfectly good if the software could at least be easily unlocked so you could only hope to install an alternative OS since they don't want to update it themselves. Or if they allowed installing stuff from outside their store.
But no, the thing runs an ancient WebKit and that's pretty much your only way to run custom code on this stuff. I can't even create an apple account from this stuff anymore, and apple won't let me create an apple account from any other device I have. Which could possibly help with jail breaking it.
I commented because my father has an iPhone 8 and vision/cognitive issues. He could very much benefit from this accessibility feature, but he hasn’t been eligible for iOS upgrades for years.
>Yes, it's odd that Apple doesn't train all its store staff on this laudable feature, but it's baffling that it doesn't shout about how good Assistive Access is for making a kid's dumb phone.
My guess is that its a bad look for PR to essentially say that a feature designed for disability assistance = children.
Do you use curb cuts? Closed captions? Difficulty sliders in games? An electric toothbrush? Audible crosswalk signals?
All of those have significant roots in accessibility for people with disabilities. I guarantee you that the people who invented them would be thrilled to see them have widespread adoption for all populations.
If something finds use in addition to its use for disability amelioration, it becomes more widespread and normalized. When it's wider spread and normalized, it becomes easier for people with disabilities to know it's available and to use it without stigma.
So no, you've got it entirely backwards I'm afraid. We do not think about assistive technology as something for people with disabilities. We think about it as something that helps people, and if it helps more people, even better.
Perhaps on HN. The general public.... i'm guessing you don't interact with average and below people very often if you belive that.
Corporations are not known for "normalizing" something at risk of billions of dollars of profit. That is never going to change. Sure once something starts to get acceptance they have no problem shouting from the rooftop about how they were first but they never sound the trumpet.
This might be just the thing for my elderly mother. She's used an iPhone for many many years, but struggles lately with motor dexterity, vision, and a bit of cognitive challenge making phone usage difficult. Lots of things I'd like to just hide she doesn't need to get to (like Settings).
In the exact same boat with my mother in law at the moment. I was thinking of getting her one of those android for elderly phones but wanted to see if I could do something with her existing iphone first. At this point, anything that is recognizable is a plus so sticking with the iPhone will help there.
Just a reminder to anyone reading that accessibility features are not just for other people but they are for our future selves. Growing old, getting injured etc are things that will happen to us all.
Affected world population:
"Whereas the presbyopic population is expected to increase from approximately 2.1 billion people currently2 to more than 4 billion people in 2050 (approximately 40% of the world’s population)3"
Kids have learned to walk places on their own without maps or satnav or tracking for hundreds of thousands of years. I believe everyone would benefit from that continuing. We don't teach kids that the only way to do arithmetic is with a calculator... they learn first, then get a tool that can support what they already know. Why do we think we should do it differently here, and train this learned helplessness without a phone glued to your hand. I suspect a lot of this is projection of the parents' own discomfort with being away from their phone.
As I parent I am downvoting this because I am quite tired of others judging parents and their technology choices- particularly when it comes to restrictions.
Parenting is hard. Parenting when everything is changing so quickly is very difficult.
Way I see it, most parents give their kids early access to phones just to keep them sedated and occupied. There is zero benefit for under 14yo to have access to the smartphone or internet. It only benefits the parents.
It's so damn easy to hit "pause" on the kid by turning on the TV or handing over a phone, but the result is so apparent: demands for more phone or more TV.
My 2c is that I'm not judging the parents, I'm judging the outputs I've seen of people raised on phones...and that's something that impacts everyone in our society. If you think you can do better, I guess go for it, but I haven't seen it
Parenting is also a strictly optional hard-mode that you choose to switch on knowing full well there's an 18 year cooldown before you can switch it off again.
My first phone that had a (rear) camera 20 years ago also had a chrome-plated mirror thing to help us take selfies. I guess nobody called them selfies then.
I guess point and shoot cameras also had those mirrors back then.
Glad to know that kids rediscovered camera selfies.
The bloody kid can take up some nice linen canvas, few sticks or charcoal, oil paint, turpentine and bloody paint his selfie! If it was good enough for Caravaggio, it is good enough for you!
There is an entire ecosystem of kid's watches which do exactly that. Pretty much just a miniature cellphone with restricted functions that goes on the wrist like some sort of a tracking collar.
it is not just simplified, it lets you chose which apps to show in that "simplified" view. For the elderly, that removes a lot of clutter and ways to shot yourself in the foot.
The article doesn't emphasize it, but Assisted Access also adds back the home/back button, like older iPhones and Androids. There is no more swipe-up motion that I see my parents struggle with because they did it too slow or started from slightly too high on the screen.
I completely understand why Apple and Google removed the buttons (gotta maximize that screen real estate), but the affordance for an obvious home/reset button is great for some people.
> I completely understand why Apple and Google removed the buttons
It was more of design decision than practical one. My phone has a taller screen than 16:9 so when I watch videos there are black bars on the sides anyway - although my previous phone had aspect ratio perfectly matching the cinema one, making movies truly full-screen (minus rounded corners and the front camera). When I'm doing literally anything else, the buttons are displayed on the bottom of the screen. Some of my friends use gestures and actually that does give them extra screen space, but IMO gestures are less convenient and totally not worth it.
But when you show this on a demo it does look neat, especially with a game.
Sometimes I imagine that the mandate of one team (like those that build accessibility features) end up at direct odds with the mandate for other teams. And then there’s maybe an internal politicking where it’s like… okay you can have that feature that completely subverts a lot of how we want users to be behaving, but you can’t market it loudly.
I have no clue how things are actually structured at Apple, though. But I’m sure at this level of product maturity, there’s going to be internal struggles between user friendliness and profitability.
This looks perfect! I had been searching around for “feature phones” but the market seems dire. Lots of carrier locked devices or devices that still offer “a little bit of internet”. And then I started thinking about finding a repair shop when my kid inevitably breaks it and an old iPhone keeps looking better and better.
Plus when my kids lose it in a bag somewhere I can use find my instead of wasting an hour digging around.
I keep observing that accessibility features often contain the tools we need to make our devices and apps more humane. This is one area that video games have been way ahead on.
Videogames are generally lagging WAY behind the rest of software. I've worked professionally in accessibility and in AAA game studios.
There's a lot of movement in games over the past 5-10 years, so there's a lot more visibility into a11y there, but in general that industry still has catching up to do. What you are seeing is higher interest and velocity there, and given some time they'll definitely catch up with the slower iteration cycles in mobile and web a11y, but I guarantee you the story is much richer on the web (in particular) than it is in games.
You're the pro. But as a casual observer, games tend to have menus with lots of settings options. Every other bit of software I use has next to none. Totally anecdotal, so I totally understand that my view is probably skewed. Keep up the good work?
I like the feature, but I don't like the assumption at the beginning.
> Come September, he will have to walk across town to school on his own. But if he's going to be walking around out in the world without me, then a tracking tag won't cut it. He is far too young to have unfettered access to the internet and social media platforms, but what if he gets lost? A classic Nokia, supplying just texts and calls, won't come to his aid. Maps and satnav require a web connection.
What if he gets lost? With a classic Nokia, he could still call someone and get help. Or, he might (heaven forbid) just need to ask someone for help. Or walk around until he remembers where he is. These are all good skills to learn.
This stuff truly makes my head spin. How do these people think humanity came to be, to today? Do they understand we in historically safe times? I thought the pendulum was swinging back on helicopter parents but some adults, some HN adults, have more money and tech-bias than common sense, or self-awareness, or any awareness of what they're doing to the children. And then remarking that they get around those restrictions. DUH?! Jesus, do some people here struggle this much to remember their own childhoods???
If it bleeds, it leads. That is, our media has hyped up violence in society as it’s become more rare, and politicians use it to scare people into thinking we need to go back to the good old days.
Only issue is that kids going outside alone has become highly stigmatized in society to the point where doing so gets you jailed and charged[0].
The kid will grow up to almost always be able to contact most any human in the world. Knowing how and when to do that is probably going to be a more useful skill.
When making claims like this, please remember that this is a very international group of people and scope your point appropriately: "has become highly stigmatized in the US"
This is not a problem in large parts of Europe (can't comment about elsewhere). The reason this scoping is important is because the solutions are different for "this is a problem in all of society" compared to "this is a problem in the US".
This is actually a really great feature for everyone else trying to reduce their phone use without switching to different "dumbphone". But why mandatory lock by passcode? I agree, that adding more friction would prevent user to switch back to standard UI, but still - it should be optional.
While all one needz in such case is new commodore (yes, that commodore) flip phone.
Whatsapp, google maps, calls, sms. No browser, no store, no bullshit. Kids dont need more, if parents dont want to ruin (part of) their childhood. No need for restrictive apple ecosystem neither.
I discovered and tried to use this feature to turn an older iPhone into a dumb phone for myself, but hit several blockers
1. It’s incredibly slow to transition in and out of the mode, as mentioned in the article, which made setting it up (constant tweaks) very painful
2. For messages and calls, you were limited to select contacts only. So I couldn’t just text/call a number when I needed to.
They may have polished the feature since then, but given that it’s an Accessibility feature and was never meant to receive much attention in this regard, it may always be half-baked.
Eh I’ve filed a few bugs a few years ago and they seem to have been ignored. I tried it for a while and it crashed my phone frequently. My gut says it’s a hack, hence the performance issues.
198 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 68.4 ms ] threadLong back Xiaomi Phones used to have soemthing like this. That one feature was how I migrated my in-laws to Smartphones from their Nokias.
The key content from the article;
Here's how you set it up: Head into Settings, tap Accessibility, scroll down to the General section at the very bottom, and tap Assistive Access. Now, tap Set Up Assistive Access, then Continue. It will then ask you to select your preferred appearance: rows or a grid. I suggest choosing a grid. This is how you get those super-large tiles. Now the OS will ask you to select allowed apps—tap the green plus icon next to the apps you want to allow.
I was very surprised of this by my own kids find workarounds like l33t hackers. Apple's restrictions are a joke. The app store is full of things they can mess with. My daughter mentioned some way to get around screen time.
I've ended up just taking the iPads away.
I still need some smartphone for work. Got the smallest one possible so at least games aren't really fun.
They didn’t give me one.
I ended up finding a way to get my own through a more apathetic adult who I could pay cash to cover my bill (only an extra $10/month on a family plan).
I certainly am not telling you to just cave in, but perhaps this story can be a reminder that technology you control is potentially better than technology you don’t.
All you can do is nudge and try not to worry too much. It's certain there are other influences in their life you don't know about.
The intention of the iPad was to watch some educational videos, check out books, magazines from the library.
They still have occasional access but only with direct active supervision (i.e we are next to them vs we are making dinner).
As they get older, we will revisit.
Excellent education
The most positive thing I read was that the kids are spending less time on social media in front of adults (like at the dinner table) because they're not supposed to be on social media.
But most of the parents in the article I read believed their kids had circumvented the ban somehow. Their problem now was that the kids' social media use was entirely hidden from them and they had no way to monitor it or even bring it up with their kids. The kids didn't want to admit to using social media at all.
None of this should be very surprising for any of us who remember back into childhood. Circumventing the restrictions was a game with its own reward. I had friends who were finding ways to get around the school's internet controls for the fun of doing it, not because it blocked any sites they wanted to use.
But the staff lists were public, and I had the default password. So I set up a script to turn the lists of names of teachers, librarians, janitors, etc. into usernames, and then tried to login with all of them. Turns out, most support staff, especially custodians, hadn't changed their passwords. (I'm guessing their jobs didn't involve much computer use). With a list of a couple dozen working accounts, I'd mete out 1 or 2 at a time to my friends, and we had teacher-level access for the rest of our time there. Don't remember using it for much, maybe showing my friends a youtube video during lunch or something.
I was candid with my kids about what I did in my youth, I was also honest with them about how terrible the tech was. They also got unfettered access to it (tech), and there were lots of conversations and consequences around its (mis)use.
Given the history of "abstinence only" sex ed, and "just say no" drug campaigns, and their massive failures; just not letting them have it seemed like it was going to create the problems that many are looking to avoid.
As they have moved into adulthood they have taken those lessons to heart, and are now the ones who complain about their peers and their abuses of social media and inability to self moderate. These same conversations continue now, with the added topic of AI -
We did have Notepad though. Notepad -> open file -> explorer -> enter URL -> internet explorer -> internets.
Not long after we both got an operating system installed on our removable drive (which we had to pay like 200+ euros for across four years and we barely used it), and bootable Linux CDs became a thing too so the protections were completely moot.
All you need is a macbook and Apple Configurator.
You can remove safari, blacklist or whitelist websites, block installing apps, block deleting apps. It's really customizable.
Looking forward to MDM support on GrapheneOS.
It sucks.
The only issue is BYOD via MDM (when it's not via "Work Profile"), which is somewhat scary from a user perspective, especially from how hard it is to tell what permissions they might be able to spring on you at any time.
Company's Outlook, Teams, MS Authenticator and Slack on my personal phone? Ehhhh fine.
The second IT requires a profile it's the second I'm uninstalling anything company related from my phone. They can give me a company phone, or I will only access work related things from their laptop.
Happened twice to me, one time I got a company phone, the other, computer only.
For instance I have recently seen a very successful Apple MDM deployment in a school environment where the teachers and staff have access to a great depth and breadth of PII of a thousand children under age 16. You don't want all those phones to become a free-for-all of people doing whatever they want.
Is it really not possible to do this with a non-Apple machine?
It turns a complicated phone into a much more simple one. Both kids and the elderly can benefit from it.
My only issue is that the was only introduced in 2024, so older iPhones can’t benefit.
I got an iPad 2 found in a drawer that would be perfectly good if the software could at least be easily unlocked so you could only hope to install an alternative OS since they don't want to update it themselves. Or if they allowed installing stuff from outside their store.
But no, the thing runs an ancient WebKit and that's pretty much your only way to run custom code on this stuff. I can't even create an apple account from this stuff anymore, and apple won't let me create an apple account from any other device I have. Which could possibly help with jail breaking it.
And android increasingly becomes like this too.
So, fuck them.
My guess is that its a bad look for PR to essentially say that a feature designed for disability assistance = children.
All of those have significant roots in accessibility for people with disabilities. I guarantee you that the people who invented them would be thrilled to see them have widespread adoption for all populations.
If something finds use in addition to its use for disability amelioration, it becomes more widespread and normalized. When it's wider spread and normalized, it becomes easier for people with disabilities to know it's available and to use it without stigma.
So no, you've got it entirely backwards I'm afraid. We do not think about assistive technology as something for people with disabilities. We think about it as something that helps people, and if it helps more people, even better.
Corporations are not known for "normalizing" something at risk of billions of dollars of profit. That is never going to change. Sure once something starts to get acceptance they have no problem shouting from the rooftop about how they were first but they never sound the trumpet.
Going to go and give my mum a call now!
I'm not holding my breath. I plan on eye surgery.
Presbyopia: https://www.aoa.org/healthy-eyes/eye-health-for-life/adult-v...
Affected world population: "Whereas the presbyopic population is expected to increase from approximately 2.1 billion people currently2 to more than 4 billion people in 2050 (approximately 40% of the world’s population)3"
https://presbyopia.worldcouncilofoptometry.info/standardofca...
Kids have learned to walk places on their own without maps or satnav or tracking for hundreds of thousands of years. I believe everyone would benefit from that continuing. We don't teach kids that the only way to do arithmetic is with a calculator... they learn first, then get a tool that can support what they already know. Why do we think we should do it differently here, and train this learned helplessness without a phone glued to your hand. I suspect a lot of this is projection of the parents' own discomfort with being away from their phone.
Parenting is hard. Parenting when everything is changing so quickly is very difficult.
Parenting is also a strictly optional hard-mode that you choose to switch on knowing full well there's an 18 year cooldown before you can switch it off again.
So, Find My is invaluable for locating it again.
I get that the internet is an addictive scary place with lots of content potentially dangerous to a young person.
But why would you care if your child took a selfie? That seems pretty draconian.
https://www.theverge.com/tech/907670/insta360-snap-usb-c-mag...
Second screen: provided by USB-C screencast and accessibility settings for to support touch. Image of device: https://platform.theverge.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/202...
I guess point and shoot cameras also had those mirrors back then.
Glad to know that kids rediscovered camera selfies.
Its draconian not because selfies are a fundamental need, but because they seem harmless. Rules should be justifiable.
1. Call mom, 2. Call dad. 3. Call Auntie.
These kid's phones were very common, inexpensive and worked great.
Simplify the iPhone home screen with large icons for kids or seniors:
Settings > Accessibility > General section at the very bottom > Assistive Access
I completely understand why Apple and Google removed the buttons (gotta maximize that screen real estate), but the affordance for an obvious home/reset button is great for some people.
It was more of design decision than practical one. My phone has a taller screen than 16:9 so when I watch videos there are black bars on the sides anyway - although my previous phone had aspect ratio perfectly matching the cinema one, making movies truly full-screen (minus rounded corners and the front camera). When I'm doing literally anything else, the buttons are displayed on the bottom of the screen. Some of my friends use gestures and actually that does give them extra screen space, but IMO gestures are less convenient and totally not worth it.
But when you show this on a demo it does look neat, especially with a game.
Give me back physical buttons please.
Does this do anything else ? Or make the app list when you go fully right different ?
I have no clue how things are actually structured at Apple, though. But I’m sure at this level of product maturity, there’s going to be internal struggles between user friendliness and profitability.
Plus when my kids lose it in a bag somewhere I can use find my instead of wasting an hour digging around.
There's a lot of movement in games over the past 5-10 years, so there's a lot more visibility into a11y there, but in general that industry still has catching up to do. What you are seeing is higher interest and velocity there, and given some time they'll definitely catch up with the slower iteration cycles in mobile and web a11y, but I guarantee you the story is much richer on the web (in particular) than it is in games.
> Come September, he will have to walk across town to school on his own. But if he's going to be walking around out in the world without me, then a tracking tag won't cut it. He is far too young to have unfettered access to the internet and social media platforms, but what if he gets lost? A classic Nokia, supplying just texts and calls, won't come to his aid. Maps and satnav require a web connection.
What if he gets lost? With a classic Nokia, he could still call someone and get help. Or, he might (heaven forbid) just need to ask someone for help. Or walk around until he remembers where he is. These are all good skills to learn.
The kid will grow up to almost always be able to contact most any human in the world. Knowing how and when to do that is probably going to be a more useful skill.
0: https://imprintnews.org/top-stories/is-it-a-crime-to-let-you...
Side note: As above article states, after this arrest SB110 was passed to specifically outline what is reasonable for this situation.
When making claims like this, please remember that this is a very international group of people and scope your point appropriately: "has become highly stigmatized in the US"
This is not a problem in large parts of Europe (can't comment about elsewhere). The reason this scoping is important is because the solutions are different for "this is a problem in all of society" compared to "this is a problem in the US".
> Come September, he will have to walk across town to school on his own.
*THE HORROR*
> But if he's going to be walking around out in the world without me, then a tracking tag won't cut it.
Uhhhhhhhhh. The way this is stated so plainly as if it were self-evident fact is telling. The author longs for the umbilical cord.
> but what if he gets lost?
What if he learns a life lesson, navigation and/or some form of self-reliance or independence?
I just... no wonder Kids Today are so cooked.
Whatsapp, google maps, calls, sms. No browser, no store, no bullshit. Kids dont need more, if parents dont want to ruin (part of) their childhood. No need for restrictive apple ecosystem neither.