Regarding tvOS, App Review, And Accessibility

My good friend John Gruber wrote over the weekend on Daring Fireball advocating for Apple to “enforce some basic standards” regarding custom video players on tvOS. He posits Apple should have codified that Apple TV developers use the system video player—which, incidentally, gives developers a lot “for free” in terms of accessibility.

“No custom video players. It’s too late for that, alas. But the tvOS App Store review process ought to insist on compliance with these accessibility and platform compliance features,” Gruber said in a Linked List item shared on Saturday. “You want to use your own custom video player? Fine. But apps with custom video players must support the “CC” [closed-captioning] button in the iOS Control Center remote control, must support the triple-click accessibility shortcut, must support the platform conventions for fast-forwarding and rewinding using the Apple TV remote control, etc. If your video player doesn’t comply, your app update doesn’t get approved.”

Let’s do a task analysis and break down Gruber’s gripes here:

• his usability complaints are, at their core, about accessibility

• App Store review

• accessibility as a baseline, part and parcel of design (and/or vetting)

First, players. Count me as one who silently judges developers choosing not to use the tvOS video player in favor of their ostensibly “better” one. I think Apple’s works (and looks) the best. Like with VoiceOver labels, developers get a lot of accessibility “for free” by using the default interface elements; the trick is realizing you must still put in effort to apply more spit-and-polish to whatever custom pieces to layer atop them. VoiceOver, for instance, will work optimally only if you teach it to recognize your custom icons, text, and whatnot. So it goes with the tvOS video player—the text and iconography are all built to play nice with accessibility features (like VoiceOver!), so the onus is on the programmer(s) to ensure the alternative they insist on using plays equally as nice. (Relatedly, it’s criminal the Siri Remote’s buttons aren’t backlit.)

Next, App Store review. Gruber says Apple ought to use the protocol to “for the benefit of users.” While it’s admittedly been some time, my understanding, according to sources, is App Store Review does kinda, sorta check for accessibility but there isn’t a formal policy. This ties into the last point on accessibility as a baseline; I agree with Gruber that, as Marco Arment argued over a decade ago, vetting for accessibility should be part of the approval process. I can’t speak to the exact methodologies App Store reviewers currently use for spot-checking accessibility, but I don’t think it’s purely speculative to say the company certainly has the capabilities to institute more robust toolsets as are feasible. In any case, it also bears mentioning Netflix, for its part, is an ally of the disability community and, for a few years, employed an executive whose purview was accessibility and whom I interviewed early on in their tenure.

While I’m at it… if a whole country can have a chief accessibility officer, so could Apple.