I don't love that solid UX gets pushed under the accessibility rug, as an option you might never find.
I don't care how cynical it sounds, user experience became user exploitation a long time ago. Big Tech have been running that gimmick at too-big-to-fail scale for the last decade or so.
Let's say you're a developer at a big software company (not necessarily Apple, this happens everywhere) and you want to add a new optional setting.
The bar is pretty high. There are already hundreds of settings. Each one adds cost and complexity. So even if it's a good idea, the leadership might say "no".
Now let's say this same setting makes a big difference in usability for some people with disabilities. You just want to put it in accessibility settings. It won't clutter the rest of the UI.
The iPhone has a hidden accessibility setting where you can map and double and/or triple tap of the back of your phone to a handful of actions. I use this to trigger Reachability (the feature that brings the entire UI halfway down the screen so you can reach buttons at the top) because phone screens are so damn big that I can't reach the opposite top corner with my thumb even on my 13 mini without hand gymnastics. And the normal Reachability gesture is super unreliable to trigger ever since they got rid of the front Touch ID home button.
Double tap is reachability for me and triple tap is to make the display very dim so that at night at the lowest brightness setting, I can get it even lower. It resets after a while so even if I forget to switch it off my screen won’t stay dim for the next few days while I wonder why it’s so damn dark.
Perhaps I could rephrase that it's hidden within Accessibility settings, not that it's an accessibility setting that is furthermore hidden.
Most people don't go into that menu to look around for things they might want to use cause features that almost everyone could benefit from are alongside settings for people with visual and hearing impairments.
Unironically calling this feature "hidden" is why things are the way they are now. It's not hidden! You can find it if you go through the settings app! But because it isn't in your face all day every now and then people will talk about this "super secret feature" and then a PM somewhere has to make a nag feature to advertise it.
Accessibility benefits everyone, but in the basics you’re right. Too many simple straightforward options are now strictly inside accessibility. At least on the Apple side.
And don’t get me started on hidden command line settings.
You're getting a lot of agreement from other HN users, but I'm not sure it's fair to criticize Apple for putting these kinds of features under Accessibility.
There's nothing that inherently "locks out" people who don't have a recognized disability from exploring these features. Furthermore, most of Apple's "accessibility" features are related to Vision/Hearing/etc (and categorized as such), so I think it's reasonable to consider them accessibility features.
Clearly based on other comments here, plenty of people discover these features and find them useful.
> Too many simple straightforward options are now strictly inside accessibility
From outside, it feels like these are the only people with the freedom to improve the user experience at all. So they have to hide their work in the Accessibility preferences.
Yes they can, but I don't and I still hate needless animations and turn them off. The point is, why is it in "accessibility" when it should be more visible?
not OP, but macOS has a ton of options available with arcane commands. my favorites are the auto-hide dock speed setting, the third hidden window minimise animation, and the hidden system accent colours usually locked to the colourful iMacs
I don't care how cynical it sounds, user experience became user exploitation a long time ago. Big Tech have been running that gimmick at too-big-to-fail scale for the last decade or so.