@adamgreenfield @jessamyn I can totally picture how a lot of these decisions are made. You raise a real concern and it gets scoffed at by the privileged people in the room who are never without reliable broadband and the whole universe catering to their needs. Everything is about shipping a new thing in time to demo for investors. There's never any time to make it accessible to the people because that's just "nice to haves."
@thomasjwebb @jessamyn It’s less about economic privilege, I think, and more about similarly unquestioned existential privilege: never having to navigate a screen with type three sizes larger than default, not even being aware that at 25 you are who the culture is fundamentally *about*, being able to work confidently with abstraction, etc.
@adamgreenfield @thomasjwebb @jessamyn "Type three sizes larger than default" is a very, very real problem. I'm more than passingly familiar with the iOS UI and have been since the UX was actually thoughtful. My mom uses precisely the same version of iOS I do on comparable hardware, though with the font size cranked up as far as it'll go.
I can find exactly *nothing* in the interface of her phone when I try to help her / make changes / undo an inane default. Nothing. I have no idea what I'm even looking at. It might as well have been written in ancient runes and painted on the side of a UFO about to land. I have to reverse engineer the entire UI because while the text might be more readable the interface is decidedly not. Every interface convention is violated so hard it becomes incomprehensible.
Aug 11, 2026, 9:46 PM@thomasjwebb @majick @adamgreenfield I'm using an iPhone SE 2020 and it's got a smaller viewport than most other phones and I find a surprising number of apps break completely with it.
@jessamyn @majick @adamgreenfield yeah that drives me nuts because to me, the SEs are the right size for a phone and most phones are too big. This is getting into personal preference territory but I do think a lot of people have accessibility issues with larger phones. And this does relate to one of myriad blind spots/biases tech companies have. I have been blown off many times when mentioning something fucks up on smaller phones.