Age, like the weather, changes how you go about your day. My eyes are going after three decades of looking at computer screens. I’ve needed to use the “Display Zoom > Larger Text” setting on my iPhone for more months than I have years by now. Until the latest iOS update, it worked just fine. The $4 trillion company’s computer-in-my-pocket I now need to function basically handled the slow shift of my vision into blurriness. Now when I click on a text field on Safari on my iPhone, a ridiculous magnification of the input area occurs, and I cannot see what I am typing.
I get these tiny machines are miracles in many ways. They are effectively magic. I move my fingers in a certain pattern, and my entire information universe comes to me. Most of the time it just works. Sometimes it doesn’t, and sometimes in glaring ways.
The failure to accommodate the full spectrum of people’s eyesight capabilities is a very familiar one. I suspect most apps and website are constructed by people whose vision jellybags haven’t withered under age’s stare, and I cannot imagine using the web if I was blind. Clearly millions of developers haven’t heard Cindy Li state a useful truth: “We’re all just temporarily abled.” Perhaps they haven’t heard of the curb-cut effect, which presents another useful truth: “Laws and programs designed to benefit vulnerable groups, such as the disabled or people of color, often end up benefiting all of society.”
Apple’s market cap is more than the GDP of around 190 nations, I am told by Google’s Gemini LLM, another tool the powers that be are determined to turn into a requirement of daily life. I wanted to link to its research, but that feature doesn’t exist like it does in Perplexity. I guess Google is struggling since its market cap is only $3.8 trillion.
There is plenty of money lying around. But money is a herd animal. It goes where other large piles of bills congregate. I guess enough of those green beasts aren’t gathering around the 2.2 billion people whose eyes, like mine, aren’t quite doing everything we need them to do.