- First I put my iPhone in black and white mode and ran through a few of the apps that I use everyday. In these cases, my familiarity with the layouts made it so that my interactions were minimally different – I was not relying on colors for clues about layout and prefered HCI. However, once I switched to a new app with which I have little familiarity (in this case Instagram), the roles that colors play became much more distinct. In particular, I found myself searching for the apple “action blue” color, but finding only gray. Black and white mode also drastically affects contrast. Since red/blue or “horizontal” isn’t possible with black and white, tones that would generally have no contrast issues turned to shades of gray and melded with adjacent objects. I can only imagine the problems this might cause for low vision users. Eliminating colors did seem to make all the apps less interesting overall though, and would likely result in less screen time for my if I had this setting turned on all the time.
- Next I tried switch control, using my screen as a single button. I struggled at first, since the system is so foreign, but quickly figured most things out. It is an amazing feat of design that this system works so fell with so few inputs. In particular, the scrolling touch features were very useful, and could be amazingly precise with only one input. Pretty cool! I navigated through most the same apps without too much trouble, although typing and passwords were a huge time sink. I would imagine that after using this system for a while it could become second nature.
IPhone Accessibility Testing
Published
Jack LeGrone Portfolio 