iOS 7 is unusable for my wife

[ggendel]

The new look has some significant problems for people with eye impairments.

My wife is showing the beginning signs of cataracts, coupled with her color-blindness, iOS 6 was fine, but iOS 7 is somewhat unusable. I've changed the font to bold, modified the contrast and brightness, but that only helps a little, specifically the keyboard isn't improved.

Who in their right mind would have text messages come out white on bright green? They are hard to read for people with good eyesight. This is not like Apple to throw away everything they've learned about accessibility over the years.

One time she was trying to see something and tried modifying the brightness. The screen went so dark she couldn't see anything and she had a very hard time recovering by hunt and pecking in the dark.

 

[kch50428]

Have you fully explored all available options under Settings>> General>> Accessibility ?

 

[dannejanne]

Try the inverted colors. It may not look pretty everywhere but it greatly enhances contrast in some apps.

 

[pr1nce]

I'm very sorry your wife is having problems. Look at all the accessibility options including the inverted colors. Good luck.

 

[ggendel]

Yes, I've played with all the accessibility settings. Since she's not blind so having it talk to her is both demeaning and impractical. The invert color works well in some cases but actually hurts in others depending on the original colors. For example, the messaging app uses various mixes of color (black on color, white on color). She would have to constantly keep switching between regular and inverted.

She's managing to cope but this was a bad oversight. I've recently heard the same complaint from several Apple employees in the local store that are color-blind. They had no problem in iOS 6, but struggle with iOS 7. They back away from demonstrating certain features to customers because of it.

 

[sting7k]

Did you turn off the parallax motion as well? Also in accessibility settings; set reduce motion to on.

 

[Miguel John1]

Yes, I've played with all the accessibility settings. Since she's not blind so having it talk to her is both demeaning and impractical. The invert color works well in some cases but actually hurts in others depending on the original colors. For example, the messaging app uses various mixes of color (black on color, white on color). She would have to constantly keep switching between regular and inverted.

She's managing to cope but this was a bad oversight. I've recently heard the same complaint from several Apple employees in the local store that are color-blind. They had no problem in iOS 6, but struggle with iOS 7. They back away from demonstrating certain features to customers because of it.

Sadly Apple probably doesn't put much thought into this when looking at the majority of the population, because probably only a small number of their user base uses the options (maybe i'm wrong), when designing an OS their primary goal is to sell phones, but yeah you don't have many options other that whats already been suggested....I would have thought inverted colours would have helped though, its a shame you can't downgrade to iOS6

 

[iMark]

My wife is having the same issues. While there is some functionality built in to help like the increased text size and bold, the color scheme and the contrast between text and background make it very difficult to see. Apple clearly has put some thought into people with vision issues, but simply didn't go far enough.

BTW, the "invert" feature seems practical until you look at a picture in "invert" mode......