I wish they'd have a year of fixing accessibility bugs instead of making feature after feature. Like they had one release of 16 where if you opened the notification center with a Braille display connected, which is crucial for Deaf-Blind people, the display would disconnect. This was brought up during betas, but it still made it into production. Now there's this bug where if you're reading a book with your Braille display, after a page or two you can't scroll down a line to continue reading. Also they've been working on a new speech platform, and it's pretty buggy.
I'm not saying Android is any better. We get a new Braille HID standard, in 2018, and the Android OS doesn't support it yet. So what does the TalkBack team have to do? Graft drivers for each Braille HID display into TalkBack, Android's screen reader like VoiceOver, with another driver coming in TalkBack 14 cause of course they can't update Android Accessibility suite like they do Google Maps, Google Drive, Google Opinion Rewards, and even Google Voice gets an update every few weeks. I mean, the accessibility suite is not a system app. If it were, it could just grab Bluetooth access and do whatever. But it's not, so it should be able to be updated far more frequently than it is. It's sad that Microsoft out of all these big companies that'll talk and talk and talk, which doesn't always include Apple, that has HID Braille support in the OS. Apple has HID Braille support too. Google doesn't, though, neither in Android or ChromeOS. They just piggy-back off of BRLTTY for all their stuff.
It’s not just accessibility, everything about their operating systems is crawling with bugs piling up on each other. They have bugs in Passwords, bugs in Shortcuts, bugs in permissions, bugs in Clock… I can no longer even trust that setting an alarm will be done for the correct time.
I'm guessing this is the "I wants alarms to be pinned to a specific moment in time and not the time the alarm is set to in the current timezone" thing.
It would be nice if this was an option but I can't really fault them for not including it since it's kinda niche.
As I wrote, I can no longer trust the alarm. I’m talking about a supported use case which broke, not a niche and unsupported situation.
This seems to be have been fixed in 16.4, but before that I would:
1. Pull down to show Spotlight search.
2. Type “alarm” and tap “Create Alarm”.
3. Set a time and tap “Done”.
The feedback message would tell me the alarm was set to a different time, with multiple hours of difference.
This is using only first-party features to do a basic task and even that didn’t work right. I could reproduce it reliably. Luckily the message was correctly showing the wrong time that was set and I double-checked it to notice.
All the other issues I mentioned still have open feedbacks about it. All but one are regressions, the other is a security flaw which has always been there.
"if you opened the notification center with a Braille display connected"
This sounds obvious, but imagine all the combinations of all the features that can interact, and then imagine having to test them all manually, because there's no automated model for specific Braille displays.
For decades, integration testing teams outnumber developers. It's just a hard problem, particularly at Apple's scale. It's not unlikely that there are only 10's of users experiencing a bug (though this one likely has thousands), and that it would take doubling or tripling the size of teams to find all these bugs before release.
I'm not saying Android is any better. We get a new Braille HID standard, in 2018, and the Android OS doesn't support it yet. So what does the TalkBack team have to do? Graft drivers for each Braille HID display into TalkBack, Android's screen reader like VoiceOver, with another driver coming in TalkBack 14 cause of course they can't update Android Accessibility suite like they do Google Maps, Google Drive, Google Opinion Rewards, and even Google Voice gets an update every few weeks. I mean, the accessibility suite is not a system app. If it were, it could just grab Bluetooth access and do whatever. But it's not, so it should be able to be updated far more frequently than it is. It's sad that Microsoft out of all these big companies that'll talk and talk and talk, which doesn't always include Apple, that has HID Braille support in the OS. Apple has HID Braille support too. Google doesn't, though, neither in Android or ChromeOS. They just piggy-back off of BRLTTY for all their stuff.