I’ve had several opportunities to reflect on 50 years of Apple in the past week. I’ve also been reading my share or recollections by others – many of whom are friends. And I’ve noticed that the loopbacks come in two flavors – stories about bumping up against Apple, the company, in the person of executives or memorable product moments. Or, people have written personal stories about how things that Apple made changed their own lives. I didn’t know this when I wrote about my own beginnings as a Mac user. But I quickly realized that I preferred stories about users, to stories about meeting an Apple CEO.
After I wrote my Mac origin story for Six Colors, I shared some details about becoming a Mac troubleshooter, over on Mastodon. And on the Maccessibility podcast, I filled in some details about what it was like to finally have accessibility tools in Mac OS, once System 7 came to town.
After all that, I was able to reflect on the words I’ve written and spoken about the bigger Apple picture, when it comes to accessibility – how those features came late to the iPhone, as I explained at length in “36 Seconds That Changed Everything: How the iPhone Learned to Talk“. Around that time, I’d also done a long piece for MacStories about iOS accessibility history.
It occurred to me that I had not, and would never have, written about accessibility back in the days when I was using the Mac to do things that were not possible for me otherwise, or when I carried a floppy disk with the CloseView control panel around the office where I was supporting 20 or so Macs. These were hacks; ways I made it possible to do the things I wanted in unique ways. There wasn’t much interest in that from the mainstream Mac press. Or if there was, I was pretty sure I wouldn’t be able to keep the inspiration porn edits out of any copy I wrote.
Are things better now, with accessibility baked into most things Apple does, as the company will eagerly tell you? Sure they are. But it remains for those of us who rely on, complain about, and hack our own accessibility, to tell the stories most people still don’t tell.
