Lessons, living with parents with dementia: when an app on their phone spontaneously changes it's icon, it's a fucking disaster.
Some Google engineer launched a feature that got them a promotion and now my mom can't use her phone anymore. Silicon Valley is incapable of imagining a user who isn't a 27 year old white man.
While I'm on this rant: The Google Phone app is horrible for seniors. Good alternatives (BIG Phone For Seniors) exist, but switching to them locks them out of the bunch of critical security features (spam and scam filtering) that could be decoupled from Google's phone app, but aren't.
It makes me so angry how hostile the tech world is to seniors.
If anyone is interested, here's the link to the BIG Launcher suite of apps for Android. The interfaces value simplicity over aesthetics and are designed to meet the needs of people with limited visual acuity. It's expensive as apps go but I have no regrets about giving them my money.
In particular, I think there should be a special place in hell for the Google engineer who decided that "swipe up" should answer a phone call and "swipe down" should hang up.
When a limited-vision person pulls their cell phone ouf of their pocket, there's only a 50/50 chance the phone is being held right-side up.
I wish I still worked at Google just so I could find that designer and slap them.
May 22, 2023, 3:30 PM@jmjm Thanks for the info about BIG Launcher. I work with a lot of low-vision older people, some of whom have some small memory problems. This seems like it would help some of them.
Also, yes adding to the rant: The regular non-mobile gmail "high contract" theme is NOT high contrast and no one seems to care. How hard would it be to make a "Large print gmail"? (yes I know you can just make the font big but that messes up the design and some of the functions)
@jessamyn BIG
BIG Launcher tip: also install the "Google Assistant" app from the Play Store. This lets you add Google Assistant as one of the buttons in BIG Launcher, so users can easily use voice commands.
It also helps to install some of the extra icon packs, so that the icon for Google Assistant can be changed from the abstract "bubble with some bubbles inside" into something more familiar (ie. the microphone icon users are used to).
I'd add MACRODROID is a fantastic complement to BIG launcher.
I've set it up so it auto answers from a.white list of numbers and blocks others.
A one touch button will call designated numbers, defaulting to WhatsApp voice if in WiFi range.
It can also reply to a SMS from one of the same numbers with location information.
And ring/vibrate as when their phone disconnects from their Bluetooth hearing aid (eg they've left it behind)
May 22, 2023, 8:11 PM@thewatershed @jmjm Thank you for that. My own cell phone usage is mostly in the Apple world but I work with a lot of people with Android phones so I try to find what will work for them.
@jmjm I also hate the change to screen gestures for navigation instead of an actual navigation interface.
Swiping from the right edge of the screen to navigate back gets dicey in something like the GMail app when swiping right-to-left deletes emails.
Or swiping up from the bottom to navigate home which gets tricky if your phone is sitting on a charging stand.
May 23, 2023, 4:22 AM@fskornia @jmjm Just FYI, you can restore the navigation icons at the bottom of the screen if you want to. https://www.theverge.com/21495830/android-11-multitasking-pane-recent-apps-screenshots-google-how-to
@jmjm that's an interesting issue: I realise that I orient the phone without looking at it by the location of the side buttons; don't impaired people do the same sort of thing?
@robparsons @jmjm I'm not visually impaired, and I can't see the side buttons on my Xperia without putting the phone on one side. (It doesn't help that I have a black gel case.)
@andy_twosticks @jmjm the point is that I don't see them, I feel them. They're easy to feel on my phone, perhaps not so easy on others.
@robparsons @jmjm If my hands naturally fell on the buttons when I picked it up it would be really annoying; I'd be forever changing the volume by accident.
My wife's new phone has a pop-up menu that appears when you touch the side. When she hands me her phone to show me something, that's all I ever see…
@andy_twosticks @jmjm ah right, that's another issue - mine are not nearly so sensitive.
@robparsons @jmjm Queue the horrible design of the remote for the Sony Bravia TV: almost perfectly symmetric layout -- even buggers me and I don't have any impairments (except a short fuse).
@jmjm Yes! Of course, this only matters if the phone hasn't already interpreted the act of pulling it out of your pocket as swiping up or down.
@jmjm an issue my nonagenarian parents also had was difficulty with touch screens and smaller buttons. Their sense of touch was just not as acute as younger folks. I really appreciate your complaints about vision… HUGE problem for my Dad especially.
@jmjm When has a google product not been vaguely user hostile?
@jmjm I had a bout of impaired cognition a few months back and I found it really hard with actions only available by swipe since I couldn't remember if I was supposed to swipe up/down/sideways etc. I found some applications with functions only available by gestures really hard to use.
Developers should really make sure that functionality be discoverable and that swipes give indications of what will happen when you release the swipe.
@jmjm For about the last five or six weeks of her life, my mom just couldn't answer her phone. The Android UI changed sometime during her final year and the new one gave her trouble, and it was too much at the end.
So yeah, I didn't speak much with her during her last days
@jmjm Same thing with swiping up and down for snoozing vs turning off the alarm. And this is just for a normal person waking up!
Swiping should just trigger snoozing. Turning off the alarm should be an altogether different gesture.
This used to be better only a few years ago.
Jun 4, 2023, 5:03 PM@jmjm i feel all of this so very much, it's the primary reason why my mom won't use a smartphone or a smart TV: the interfaces are too busy and complicated for older folks, especially older folks with manual dexterity problems.
Honestly the modern world is terrifying and opaque to most folks over 70.
@jmjm this is really interesting.
My father doesn't have dementia, but he's really struggling to use his smart phone, and increasingly, you can't be an adult and not have a smart phone. So frustrating.
May 23, 2023, 6:45 AM@jmjm I don’t know the details or full context of your folks’ situation, obviously, but I would keep an eye on this: https://www.macstories.net/news/apple-marks-global-accessibility-awareness-day-with-features-coming-to-ios-ipados-and-macos-later-this-year/
Jun 4, 2023, 10:07 AM@jmjm
My father has that on his phone, apparently. Maybe it is best for him, but *I* cannot deal with it.
@jmjm this is sad. I know people on Google accessibility team and I know they take this stuff seriously.
> spam and scam filtering
Yet Another Call Blocker works with every dialer and doesn't require selling your soul to Google: https://f-droid.org/packages/dummydomain.yetanothercallblocker/
@noodlejetski Thanks, that's worth noting. Also, t-mobile offers a similar call filtering app for their users.
@jmjm My dad has Parkinson's so I feel every word of this rant.
@jmjm
Correction: The Google Phone app is horrible. Period.
There's something true about this.
OTOH, the idea that only the white tech-bro elite should aspire to being able to cope with an icon change, feels like writing-off the capacities of 99% of humanity.
@interstar @jmjm I'm probably a member of this group (depending on what's meant by "white", "tech-", "bro" and "elite"), and I can just barely cope with icon changes, on a good day. 99% is an overestimate; and, irrelevant.
It seldom matters whether something's within one's capability to deal with, if it's forced upon one. How *my* environment works should never be subject to *your* corporate branding decisions.
It's not your space. Stop changing the wallpaper and moving the furniture around.
@wizzwizz4 @interstar @jmjm
This!
@jmjm I was so on board with this rant and then it pivoted into...somehow this is because maybe bigotry? I'm a middle aged white man who works in tech: where do I apply to get permission to also hate these pointless confusing UX changes that make using my devices into a daily minefield?
@jmjm I find it difficult, I don't like change. But yes, dementia will take that to a whole new level.
@jmjm that happens to people I know who have no dementia. Neither Google's marketers not their UX people live in the real world.
@robparsons
Hell, I'm in my 40s and I find it slows *me* down significantly. On my desktop/laptop I put a fair amount of energy into making new versions of things look like the old ones, but that's usually hard or impossible on mobile :(
@jmjm
Me too. I've started running it on one of the older machines to get used to it. It feels that with Windows 11 you're effectively using a terminal that you're renting.
@robparsons
Could use WSL or Linux in a VM and gradually move functions/ tasks over one by one? Not sure what X servers are available for Windows these days but I bet there are some.
@rastilin
My Windows 10 machine is a cut down AME version that doesn't have the windows store and never will.
The Windows store, aside from being generally terrible, undermines the Windows system as a general OS that you own, as do automatic updates. If they can force push software to your machine, it's no longer your machine. You can wake up on any morning to find out that some business critical software no longer works, or the machine doesn't boot, or some other problem.
I've never tried WSL, but I don't see the point to it as long as cygwin exists. Except that cygwin is not controlled by Microsoft.
I recommend trying a Live USB made with Rufus. You can tick a box to give it permanent storage and then any changes you make in livecd mode will stick between reboots. All the Ubuntu versions should support this mode.
Gladly. Rufus is https://rufus.ie/en/ , it can write a linux disk to a USB. A lot of Linux DVD images have the option to just run off the disk (LiveCD), as if you had it installed, but since it runs in memory, nothing is saved permanently. If you select the option in Rufus to make a permanent partition it lets the LiveCD functionality save to the USB as it's C: drive, or /home/user/ on linux, so it can store bookmarks, installed software, updates, whatever.
It actually works as a layer ontop of the disk image, so you can install updates and make other lower level changes as well.
Does that make sense?
@jmjm Google tried to get me in a car crash because they decided to spontaneously move the clock on Android Auto without any warning. I really wish someone would create an open source alternative that will still work with the cars.
@jmjm It's google, they are just full of themselves. And evil.
@jmjm Honestly, they're just trying to keep up with the bad apples, who have always known what is best for everyone. They said so in 1984.
@jmjm I don’t work for Google but I can see how this would be so easily overlooked and, as accessibility advocate, I acknowledge this is a problem. I assume this would be the same for when a service gets rebranded. Would you perhaps have any input onto how to make a transition of such magnitude as painless as possible?
@rodrigoescobar don’t rebrand
@pearfalse sadly not an option :(
May 22, 2023, 5:21 PM@jmjm I for one have always found icons on mobile to be utterly meaningless
@UP8 yes.
May 23, 2023, 12:25 PM@jmjm people always ask "what color should i pick?" but the most important think about color is value or dark vs light and if you look at that screenshot in greyscale you see right away that those icons fall flat because they have very limited contrast... even for normally sighted people a design that isn't meaningful in monochrome isn't meaningful
@jmjm Just switched to Android along with an older family member and it has, to be honest, been a bit frustrating. This family member is good at video games - which have painstakingly taught them every complicated detail with tutorials and tooltips - and the Android phone doesn't seem to be user friendly in that way at all.
Google's really messed up when someone can play a super complicated gacha JRPG like a pro, but misses a call because they can't figure out how to answer it.