iOS26 is an actively hostile user experience for disabled and/or visual impaired users.

[GBstoic]

No one much over the age of 25 would be seen dead with a bright orange phone let alone anyone over 50, so it's very clear they have completely abandoned the older market altogether.

Really? I am 71 and have orange smart folios on my iPads, regularly buy orange trail running shoes from Saucony & Salomon as my daily choice of footwear and my iPhone 16 is in ultramarine. People’s liking for vibrant colours doesn’t change as they age.

 

[Ta_whirimatea]

I agree with the original post. My wife is hearing impaired & we both find iOS is leaps & bounds ahead of the competition in audio fidelity during calls. Blue toothing everything to her hearing aids was a game changer for her.
A friend / work colleague who is blind & has an iPhone uses all the accessibility features & I can see 100% the struggle she would have with the visual display of the operating system. Watching her use her iPhone is awe inspiring & shows an impairment isn’t a disability etc.

hopefully when she upgrades to ios26 it’l retain all her settings otherwise she’d be screwed trying to find stuff.

These software ‘updates’ are only as good as the designer/coder is. Personally whoever is writing code UI for Siri / CarPlay & iTunes (music app) on iPhone & Mac should go back to their kindergarten as they’ve clearly never tried to play music in a car, transfer albums to an iPhone without it duplicating songs etc

 

[maverick100]

I agree completely; TOTAL DISASTER. I tried iPad 26 on my iPad. worthless; it is terrible when trying to read lots of web sites they are just plain blurry. Glad I found a way to wipe the iPad and return to 18.6 and them update 18.7. At lease now I can see things.

 

[tallen21]

I agree! Maybe not hostile but certainly NOT user friendly if you have vision issues. The least they can do is make an option to turn off the "liquid" look! Overlaying words on top of words or words under "liquid" makes them VERY HARD TO SEE. I haven't used it enough to learn all the other problems they just saddled us with. To say I'm not happy is an understatement.

 

[Eureka20]

I was very lucky to have a second phone for work that I installed it on-- it was heinous! A coworker warned me about the update he woke up to and it gave me a chance to turn off updates for my personal phone.

The design is terrible and it's jarring and overly stressful to use.

 

[AshX]

Apple products have been hostile toward many with visual and neurological conditions since Apple Silicon and the decision to use spatiotemporal dithering to fake 10-bit on nearly every single Apple device. Not to mention the reliance on PWM for OLED and MiniLED devices. I’m not at all surprised iOS/MacOS 26 is following the trend of flash over user comfort.

What happened to the device just getting out of the way as Steve Jobs would say and allowing you to be productive? I care about the programs and apps on my devices - not so much about the UI looking like a worse version of Windows Vista nearly 20 years later.

The solution would be to go full Android and just let users revert to older UI schemes, graphics, and effects. But no, it’ll take 5 years for them to reverse course just like the butterfly keyboard fiasco before it.

It’s going to be a nightmare to migrate off Apple devices but I think this leaves me no choice. So much for Accessibility.

 

[jz0309]

I've been wondering about that myself.
I haven't tried it yet but I'm pretty sure I'll find it more difficult to see.
It's part of a trend. It started when they got rid of the skeuomorphic icons and replaced them with an endless sea of meaningless pastel. The slide bars became invisible, then things like back buttons became an almost invisible, tiny black triangle.
No one much over the age of 25 would be seen dead with a bright orange phone let alone anyone over 50, so it's very clear they have completely abandoned the older market altogether.

I guess I was dead wrong getting this then at age 66

 

[jz0309]

This iOS26, on the iPhone 16 at least, is very very bad for disabled people and anyone with visual problems. It obviously hasn’t been trialed with disabled people, or taken any of a wide range of disabilities into account in its design – if they had, most of the Liquid Glass and “frosted glass blob” visual junk would be easily switch-off-able under the Accessibility settings.

Usually Apple OSes have been excellent for accessibility, at least compared to the major competition. This OTOH is actively hostile to disabled and visual impaired users.

I don't know anything about your disabilities.
Let me tell you that for the past year or so I had "reduce transparency" and "increase contrast" turned on on my 13PM and it made it for legible for me. I'm 66 btw, and vision is right with me at that age.
When I installed the RC of ios25 I turned both those settings off, so I could see for myself what all the fuzz is about.
Guess what, those 2 settings are still off after I've been using it now for 10 days, and I for one have zero legibility or other "Liquid Glass" related issues. I like what Apple has done.
But that's just me and I can appreciate that others feel different.
The title of this thread is hyperbole, nothing else really tbh.

 

[Mostly Adequate]

I don't know anything about your disabilities.
Let me tell you that for the past year or so I had "reduce transparency" and "increase contrast" turned on on my 13PM and it made it for legible for me. I'm 66 btw, and vision is right with me at that age.
When I installed the RC of ios25 I turned both those settings off, so I could see for myself what all the fuzz is about.
Guess what, those 2 settings are still off after I've been using it now for 10 days, and I for one have zero legibility or other "Liquid Glass" related issues. I like what Apple has done.
But that's just me and I can appreciate that others feel different.
The title of this thread is hyperbole, nothing else really tbh.

“It doesn’t affect me personally, so therefore it can’t be true” is such a fallacious attempt at an argument.

 

[SparklyApple]

My biggest accessibility issue with iOS is how it works with Bluetooth hearing aids. Or rather, doesn’t.

I’ll set the scene. Bluetooth is enabled and hearing aids are paired. Streaming music and watching video works perfectly. I quit my music app and start Safari.

Now, I scroll a random website. Odd, I can’t hear the sounds around me anymore. It’s like my hearing aids have been dialled waaaaaay down. I have autoplay video previews off in Safari settings. I scroll up and down the page and can’t see any video playing at all. Yet still my hearing aids are acting like video/audio is playing.

This happens multiple times a day. Some apps do it as well – games in particular (which have all sound effects and music switched off), but not exclusively. The BBC News app does it sometimes too.

There is no way that I have found to either prevent a specific app from ever initiating a Bluetooth connection, nor making apps “ask every time” (which I would find useful for Safari).

Having the sound around me suddenly and unexpectedly vanish because I’ve opened a webpage or an app is downright dangerous. It’s not like I opened YouTube and video started playing – that would be expected of autoplay was on. This is unexpected and unwanted. Using Bluetooth also drains my hearing aid batteries faster than they would normally drain, which is also a safety issue.

I suspect also that this might affect Bluetooth headphones as well, and could be draining those batteries faster than they otherwise would drain too.

Would love to hear (ha!) if this is just me or if others experience it too.

 

[turbineseaplane]

I wish Apple would take accessibility concerns more seriously.
They pay it lip service, but in practice there are many problems with it for those who truly need these features.

It's really frustrating and sad to see.

Accessibility should not just be toggles to "turn off half of the UI".
That's a disservice to those who require accessibility affordances.

 

[eRondeau]

Turn on Reduce Transparency and Increase Contrast which I have had on ever since Apple introduced them several releases ago. Hopefully they won’t turn them off on when I eventually upgrade when 26.3 is released.

I also changed my lock screen and screen background to basic black only. It forces you to focus on the text and app icons no matter what Apple does to make it more difficult. I wish iOS would offer a "single switch" to do all of these things together... every day I see people my age (50+) squinting & struggling to read their screens.

 

[MisterSavage]

Just an FYI for the accessibility settings such as reduce transparency that were mentioned. You can also turn them on/off on a per-app basis instead of making the setting apply to every app.

It's under Settings, accessibility, per-app settings.

 

[newellj]

deleted duplicate post

 

[panjandrum]

I decided that Tahoe is actively hostile to everyone, so I uninstalled it. Just one more rotten fruit on the Apple tree.