AppleVis Posts ‘Vision Accessibility Report Card’
My friend and fellow accessibility aesthete Shelly Brisbin reports today for Six Colors AppleVis has shared the 2025 edition of its Apple Vision Accessibility Report Card. The scorecard is, of course, a riff on the annual, canonical Six Colors Apple Report Card.
I’m not involved with AppleVis, but am a longtime contributor to the Six Colors one.
“A primary goal of our Apple Vision Accessibility Report Card is to provide blind, DeafBlind, and low vision users a platform where they can speak openly and honestly about their experience using Apple products and services. Each rating included a question that invited participants to provide written comments on the aspect being evaluated; included is an expansive and wide-ranging selection of the responses we received. Participants were given the option to have their comments be quoted anonymously or attributed to their AppleVis display name,” AppleVis said of its fourth annual survey. “Selected comments are presented in the order in which they were submitted. To ensure accurate and authentic representation of user voices, AppleVis did not edit the content (diction, grammar, spelling, etc.) of participant comments. Comments were lightly formatted to ensure readability and content accessibility.”
The so-called “executive summary” AppleVis provides at the outset is a cogent, and I think, highly instructive read. AppleVis notes, amongst other things, “dissatisfaction with software quality” among Braille and VoiceOver users, adding low vision users—a lot I’m rightly included in by association—felt strongly Liquid Glass “had a significant negative impact on the user experience for many.” Such a comment raised an eyebrow for me in context of Mark Gurman reporting for Bloomberg this past weekend the UI design language “isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.” Depending on your feelings, Gurman’s story may be seen as Apple essentially putting lipstick on the proverbial pig.
(For the record, it’s my unbiased opinion pigs can be pretty damn adorable.)
Back to the AppleVis report card. The grades are interesting, but I find the commentary even more intriguing. I’ve been covering Apple at extremely close range for close to 13 years now, and I’ve definitely heard from readers who bemoan Apple’s software quality vis-a-vis accessibility. I’m not a VoiceOver user, so I can’t speak to the bugs that apparently continue to infest the screen reader, but I believe those users who speak their own truth. If nothing else, this quip from participant “Young” speaks volumes when they say “accessibility QA is becoming worse… [there are] too many bugs whenever [an] OS gets upgraded.” Their statement speaks in a tone eerily similar to those macOS diehards in the community who’ve perpetually lamented a perceived, and precipitous, decline in the quality of their beloved desktop operating system.
AppleVis, by the way, is owned by Be My Eyes, who I wrote about this morning.
