Apple accessibility now using AI to respond to emails... Bleak.

the accessibility support team have too much on their plates. better off beta testing, and filing suggestions in the feedback assistant app. .

I agree with Oliver on this one

You guys simp for AI and then you complain when companies use AI to write automated emails. The irony.
As for accessibility: It seem to be more and more of an afterthought. VoiceOver on IOS is working well for me, but I can definetely notice the bugs. And they're getting worse. So yeah, I disagree with the "The accessbility team have a lot of work" argument. If they did, accessibility bugs wouldn't be (or feel like) an afterthought.

As for accessibility being an afterthought: Just look at their presentations and promo material. If it's not around global virtue signaling day (AKA global accessibility awareness day), there's nothing. And with new products, they're not even mentioning accessibility in presentations. Oh, we have a foldable phone where blind people watching the presentation might wonder if or how well VoiceOver is going to work with that? Well fuck that minority, figure it out yourself.

Sorry for the rant, but I just had to get that off me.

Ah yes, I'm sure addressing a collective as a monolith will definitely not flatten out any semblance of nuance, Anyway, agreed, VoiceOver on iOS 27 is extremely laggy and the experience is horrendous for a release candidate. Lag, misinterpreted jestures, the whole volume thing, the different sound signature, the broken voice equalizer... Need I go on?

Hi all,

Just a gentle reminder that, while we do allow limited use of profanity on AppleVis, strong profanity (like the F-bomb) is not permitted--even when used for emphasis as was the case in this thread. I am cognizant that the discussion here is about Apple Accessibility, and as moderators we try especially to stay out of these discussions in particular. At the same time, strong profanity like the F-bomb is not permitted on AppleVis, even when criticizing Apple.

Thanks,

Michael

My experiences with Apple Accessibility have really been nothing but positive. I think I’ve only had one negative experience the entire time I’ve ever called Apple and it’s been a lot. I was on the phone all the time with Apple Accessibility when I was first learning to use an iPhone and that’s really how I got most of my training. And even just last night I called them for something I was having issues with and we got my issue resolved like really right away. It wasn’t even really a specifically Accessibility issue, but there are more than willing to look at it and figure out what was going on. So really my experience has been very positive. As far as AI generating your emails, I mean it certainly possible. But there’s always been kind of Automated emails through things with Accessibility. That’s just the way it is. They had to sit down there and write every single email themselves. They wouldn’t be spending the time to fix the Accessibility bugs that people are having. So I think Accessibility is doing the best they can with what they have to work with I really do. I can’t wait to see how iOS 27 goes. I know this is not be being an Apple fan girl. This is just been my experiences. If there’s been bugs, there’s been things that are frustrating, but I really genuinely do not think it’s because Apple Accessibility isn’t trying and doesn’t care and all this kind of thing I don’t think that at all. I think they’re doing the best as they can. I’m just happy that there is a company who gives Accessibility to us at all. Remember, nobody has to. We’re not entitled to anything just for simply having a disability. Even if people supposedly don’t do it for the right reason at least you have it available to you. It’s been an ongoing concern of mine for a long time people to stay around and complain about things. It’s OK to criticize. It’s OK to tell people when things aren’t right and need to be fixed. There’s a constructive way to go about it. I can totally see why it is kind of ironic that everybody wants Apple to capability things when they want to write things with AI and then complain when a company is using AI to write an email. This kind of ironic have to agree with that comment.

Iam baffled by your experiences because Voiceover for me has never been this responsive on iOS, on MacOS as well. I do agree that on Apple Watch it is a mess right now, but everywhere else it works like a charm, and once you get used to the new EQ you don't even know that something has changed. I took some time to read the beta threads and I literally cannot reproduce a single bug anymore. The only serious bug I currently have is the time being incorrectly read sometimes, or notifications, both happening when the screen is locked and then checking the time or if a new notification comes in.

Does Apple have bugs? Sure what software doesn't. Present your bugs in a calm way. Include a screen recording. Have the mic on. State what happened and what you expected to happen. Example only:
When I long pressed on the app store I expected the menu to come up with search updates ETC. What happened nothing happened. Again this is for illustrative purposes and not real results.
If you have safari not responding if you can find a page where it constantly triggers again do a screen recording. attach it to your feedback report. Screen recordings are extremely helpful. I've heard this from several developers. I now make it a point to attach a screen recording to all feedbacks. It might take me a few minutes longer but it increases the likelyhood of it getting fixed.

I'm no apple fan girl by any means, yeah there is bugs but for me personally over the years, apple has been pretty good with accessibility.
I don't agree with AI generated emails, but AI seems to be the norm these days. Sure the accessibility team doesn't have all day to answer every single email, but some kind of human response should be given.
At the end of the day apple does the best it can.

Hi,
This is, honestly, a pretty silly topic where a company responded to your email in a professional manor, you jumped to your own conclusion, cool, must be AI, let's go to Applevis.

If you are expecting the Apple Accessibility Team, or any Accessibility Team to debate the ethics of how LLMs work and whether the world is fair for blind users in comparison to sighted users, I'm sorry to tell you, but the person who would give a response to that one would be instantly fired, and as cool as it might be that a blind person got a fair and an objective response, staying employed kind of takes priority. I think it's time to step out of our own bubble and join the real world for a moment here. You can't compare an LLM describing an image to a sighted person looking at the image. A sighted person can add their own interpretation, because they're looking at the data. An LLM is, to the best of its ability, supposed to stay objective and impartial, which is why, at the moment, some images will simply be avoided.

I've seen, for instance, a lot of criticism about image descriptions refusing to gender somebody. And why would they do so? How exactly would they, with 100% certainty determine somebody's gender? Not even 100%, because that is a pretty high bar, but with any certainty at all. And what happens when your LLM tells you somebody is female, but they actually identify as a male, or your LLM simply made a mistake? It would cause some pretty awkward conversations to say the least... and who do we blame? Apple screwed up and told me this person is female, lawsuit incoming...
To be clear, this is a very new technology, for all of us. One model might very well give you the gender, even Apple Intelligence can be convinced to do so, in some cases. There is no definitive this won't ever work, or this will always work type of situation. I don't think simply playing the we're being discriminated against card works here, as long as there are actual objective reasons for some images to be avoided by an LLM, and at the moment, this is the case. Nobody is intentionally filtering images because you are blind, your LLM doesn't even know that you are blind, and if a sighted person submitted the image to Apple Intelligence, they would get the same output. If we were talking about a different, censored model blind people are specifically getting access to, that would be a very different story.

None of this means that I am happy about it, or that the world is fair. The thing is, the world was about ten times less fair just a couple of years ago, where not a single image was described and we had access to no visual media. None of this means we should just stay quiet and shut up about it either, I just don't think it should be the expectation of Apple, or any single company for that matter to solve the global world problems, and LLM ethics quickly became one of them. I strongly believe that this will be a solved problem in the near future, that there will be uncensored models we will be able to use, or even models which are more interpretative and subjective (if the user wants this), but a single email to Apple Accessibility won't magically make this happen. We're still in the phase of figuring out how to deal with the emergence of this new technology, and we should absolutely be at the forefront of its development, especially considering its accessibility implications, but I don't think unreasonable requests such as I simply want all images described because a sighted person can look at them help our case, it would b a little like saying every app should be accessible because a sighted person can use every app, so why can't I? This is of course our goal, in the ideal world, this is what we are fighting for, but just like that isn't something we can achieve overnight, neither is the fight for an uncensored model able to describe any image with no restrictions.

I like AI. This might be AI; it might not, does it really matter? It would insure that tonnes of emails get answered fast, but honestly I don't think it's AI.

Are you saying that you didn't mention blurring images at all and the AI just grabbed data out of nowhere?

The truth is we won't be able to tell soon what is AI and what isn't. I'm not bothered about this at all and look forward to it.

I completely agree here with these last two comments nobody is discriminating against us. This is a new technology that everybody is trying to figure out how to deal with. It’s not just the blind people. You would know this one all kinds of news conversations all the time you’re freaking out the best way to regulate it and deal with it. This is something that’s kind of a bit of an unknown territory that completely but it’s still fairly new compared to the other technologies that we’ve had. Also, there’s plenty of us that know how far we’ve come for the technology that we do have access to. I think if you think about things that way might help you to appreciate what’s actually available now. Luke comes so far and yet we still expect so much to happen right away. None of the technology that we currently enjoy was ever just handed out overnight and wasn’t able to work. It took years of time and development before we got the technology that’s available now so we should be appreciating where we are and helping to develop things if we can for our futures and just keep moving forward and enjoying our life, the best we can that’s the best we can do and I really don’t think Apple is intentionally forgetting anyone. They want everybody to be able to use their technology. They wouldn’t have an Accessibility set up if they didn’t care about that plus AI isn’t really that much as much of a direct Apple Accessibility feature used everywhere else too so emailing Apple isn’t necessarily going to change how this works.

For me, the email response reads like they've ever read. Also, what's the problem if Apple uses AI to escalate topics automatically to the right team?

Exactly there’s nothing wrong with it. They can get your information to the people that need to fix it and it gets fixed so I don’t really see what the issue is. They read the emails I get emails from Apple Accessibility a lot and there with my specific cases and they’ve given me like steps to fix the problems and stuff like that so I think they do read the emails. Maybe not every single one of them but like I said earlier on this thread if you really had a response from a person. Every time I email went out you’d have to be spending so much time responding to our emails but they wouldn’t have the time to fix the bug and then somebody would complain about that so either way people come on here with something to complain about I guess if you really feel the need to complain then complain to the people I can actually do something about it. Would you come onto apple vi affiliated with them or anything so there’s really no point in coming on here and saying anything about it as far as I concerned. Yes I know we’re allowed to criticize Apple, but I mean as far as things that they can actually do to solve something that we’re concerned about better off going directly to them.s they really can’t.

Nothing's changed there at all. As for the descriptions, I agree with the others. If you want more info, just ask. However, I am very disappointed with the broken Voiceover, and reporting the bugs is useless because nothing at all has been fixed, at least not since I downloaded my first beta. I am rather angry about this because nothing works the way it should and final release is in a few days.

If folk have not yet read The Many Faces Of Equality, they should. It showcases the facial recognition issue but could easily be applied to other content AI blurs out. I repeat the point I've made elsewhere that there are very good reasons to need to look at sensitive content, so not to have that ability is suboptimal. As for AI answering our emails - you know, I got very cross a few weeks ago when I discovered that our local medical practice had employed an AI receptionist. She's called Emma, incidentally. I say she, though she did not answer when I asked her for her preferred pronouns. anyway, as I say, I got rather cross about this; but how wrong I was. Emma has made the dear old medical practice much, much more efficient. I had a question a couple of weeks ago, for example, which in the human days would have taken ages to filter through to someone who could answer it. with Emma, I got a text from the doctor with an answer no more than two minutes after submitting my query. In short, I can see why it might appear tiresome but maybe using AI might free them up to act on our queries more efficiently.

Bingo is an apple fan and is not buying into this fad about bbeing all coy about it. There is no way a Droid is crossing the threshold of bingo Towers anytime in the short- to medium-term future. On the contrary, they'd better keep orf!

The other day I went back and forth with OpenAI support over email. I deliberately chose email because I didn't want to deal with one of those live chatbots. Go figure: I ended up talking to an AI anyway.

In my case, though, it actually worked reasonably well. I used ChatGPT to help me explain the problem because it already had a lot of the relevant context from previous conversations. I didn't send screenshots; I copied and pasted the walls of text that were appearing on particular screens and used those to explain exactly what was happening.

After going through everything, we eventually came to the conclusion that the problem was probably at OpenAI's end rather than something I was doing. The plan is to follow up on it again in a few weeks.

So I can't really complain too much about companies using AI to answer support emails. If they're going to use AI to reply to me, I can use AI to help me reply to them. As long as we don't end up with two AIs going round and round in circles forever, I don't particularly care.

I've only contacted Apple Accessibility once, a couple of years ago. I can't even remember the exact issue now, except that it involved video. It eventually stopped being a problem after I upgraded to a newer iPhone with a better processor. I didn't buy a new phone specifically to fix it; I needed a new phone anyway, and that particular problem just happened to disappear at the same time.

For me, the important question isn't really whether an email was written by a human or AI. It's whether the problem actually gets passed to the right people and eventually gets dealt with.

Completely agree with this last comment. It matters that the problems get solved efficiently not how their methods are used to get the information past. We have a lot to be grateful for for the technology and I said earlier.

First, the response from Apple accessibility shared by the OP looks exactly like the response I received years ago, before the widespread use of LLMs, except that it appears they’re now attempting to reflect the subject of the feedback as a human might do. That’s not at all a terrible idea.

As for sensitive content descriptions, it is well known that big tech is conservative and thus tends to avoid most things that wouldn’t be considered family friendly, so this definitely isn’t specifically discrimination against the blind. It sucks, but I’d argue that AI description has always had limitations, even for content that isn’t considered sensitive. I think it would be more productive to encourage sighted people to describe the content they post rather than complaining about what AI inadequately describes.

Using AI to generate drafts and reviewing them before just hitting Send instead of having to compose the reply seems to be a better approach. Even having AI compose an e-mail on its own shouldn't be a problem in and of itself, but then the user should have the option to either confirm that the response resolves the issue or otherwise satisfies his/her expectations, or request that a human employee from the appropriate team look into and respond to the e-mail or pass it on to the relevant team. The final decision shouldn't be left to AI. Accessibility has already been an afterthought for years, and AI replacing human interactions when responding to bug reports or feature requests has the worst impact on accessibility compared to any other so-called mainstream feature or bug. The bitter truth is that they know we're gonna pay them to upgrade our devices no matter what, because VoiceOver and Apple in general has always had a higher reputation compared to Talkback/Android even after all the recently introduced screen readers and other accessibility improvements. And migrating to Android becomes harder as one gets used to Apple products and the so-called Apple ecosystem. So if we still purchase Apple products and they can still make enough revenue without having to pay accessibility staff as much, then their current policy is exactly what one would do to maximize one's profit. So don't expect that to change anytime soon. Even Cook, despite appearing to advocate for "inclusivity", chose to promote Apple as a leading defender of "LGBT+" rights, because that didn't require much investment apart from adding some new wallpapers, as opposed to actually taking user feedback seriously and putting enough effort into fixing current bugs. The new CEO already focuses on hardware upgrades and AI and other "mainstream" stuff that yields the highest amount of revenue with the least amount of investment as possible. And as a result, iOS 27 is expected to introduce a bunch of new bugs, let alone introducing the ones already present for years. Hope the public release proves me wrong.

I used to work in telephone customer service, and a big part of that is keeping responses sincere and on message. Sometimes, saying less with sincerity is better than saying more. A heartfelt "Thank you for taking the time to write to us and share your feedback" would be sufficient, especially for something like this where the agent on the receiving end has zero power to change policy. The "We understand you are requesting that image description be reconsidered for sensitive content, along with your suggestion of AI-based blurring for sighted users" totally blew an opportunity to make the user feel heard and validated, at least as I see it. Making a user feel heard and validated does not require someone to make statements about company policy or otherwise say anything their employer would prohibit them from saying.

No one will sue Apple or any of the LLMS. There has always been a disclaimer that AI descriptions may not always be correct. In fact, the reason why these models use words like "It may be a female", etc is exactly to avoid this kind of confusion, and leave it to the blind user to verify. There is nothing wrong with an LLM describing that this may be an accident scene and a blue car is lying on its side.

Yeah, when it comes to (generative) AI, I have difficulties with nuances.

Hey, it’s cool. We’re all allowed to have our own opinions. And I can totally understand like being frustrated with the Mac and everything like that. I get that. I never had one, but based on the things that I write on here I kind of don’t really want one. As far as the phones are concerned well I’m going to read the blog post on here before I update anything. I always do that even if it’s a minor release. We all use our devices a little bit differently. There’s also times where we don’t always have the same bugs so I just have to kind of see what happens I guess. The update is coming out Monday. I’m actually kind of excited for it. I just like to see what’s new and stuff like that. I know there’s not gonna be that much new this year but that’s totally cool. Both of my devices will at least be getting the update. And they’re both iPhones so that’s the important part. I guess. I probably won’t update the first day. The thing is like I’ve never been cited so I’ve never been able to use technology any other way than a screen reader so I really have nothing else to compare it to. I really do think that Accessibility are doing the best they can with what they have to work with though I really do still like that. I actually just talked to them a few days ago and it was like super positive. I mean, I haven’t always gotten every single issue resolved like right away but they’ve been really good about you following up with things me and making sure that everything‘s working stuff like that you know like they really do keep tracking that kind of stuff and you know follow up and everything. I’ve never had anybody like not follow up with me so I figured it’s been pretty positive overall. Yes there’s things that are frustrating like you know not being able to update over sale data but Apple‘s thinking that that’s probably a carrier issue for me so I’m gonna have to figure that out, but it’s fine. I’m gonna get everything updated later on today I’ll be on Wi-Fi and it should be all good. I just hope everybody has a great experience with iOS and macOS this year. You know as much as we can I know we all use our devices differently, but hopefully there won’t be too many bugs with the final release. We’ll just have to wait and see. Oh yes, and iPadOS.

If they pay that much attention to you, please mention the bugs we've been discussing on Applevis because we're just ignored. Let's see if they'll actually inform the engineers and fix the bugs then.

You know that’s a really great point. That’s actually the reason that I still have iPhones. Because I love knowing that whatever iPhone I hook up I’m already gonna know how to use it. It’s just as crazy as it sounds almost like comforting because I already know pretty much how this thing is gonna work. I mean they have their individual differences just because of being different phones but like iOS really doesn’t change. Hell I was literally on an iPhone 8 my first iPhone ever and then when my sister gave me her old iPhone 5 to kind of play around with that she had lying around. I was still able to use that you didn’t matter cause it was still iOS and I mean it was just like really nice that everything will just work. I guess that I already know how to do it. It’s not gonna be some major change and that’s literally what would keep me off of android to be honest. Yeah, I don’t really use Photos at all so image descriptions for me. Wouldn’t really be a big change. And I mean, if there’s like little bugs you know depending on what they are I might wait to update to 27.1 who knows. I just thought that that was interesting that you know somebody who worked at Apple, but actually suggested that. But yeah, we’ll just see what happens. I guess it’s coming in just two more days if you’re counting today or one if you’re counting Sunday. It’s almost like that you know waiting for Christmas or whatever holidays that people get excited over you know like wait to see what it’s gonna be like that’s kind of how I feel when I get a new iOS anyway. But yeah, I mean minor bugs are great but every software is gonna have them so it depends on how we feel individually about our phones and your cases and all that fun stuff. I totally different note weren’t we supposed to get a new ringtone and iOS 26? It could’ve sworn there was like a beta that there was gonna be a new ringtone in and there was an article where I literally got to hear the sound of the ringtone and then it never came. It was so weird and I actually kinda liked the ringtone too. I don’t remember the name of the ringtone or anything, but I thought we were supposed to get a new ringtone and we totally never did. Oh well, it’s a minor thing but I do like playing around with ringtones basically almost as much as I like playing with the voices so yeah all right I’ll get out of here now. :-) Thanks for reading guys.

I feel like this isn't something worth fighting about or thinking about too much. I really feel like there are major problems with current AI tech, but we have kind of entered a technopanic, just like the satanic panic in the eighties and a lot of conversations around AI are not productive. I think professional emails are generally always scripted. So this doesn't matter.

First, who knows if that email was AI or not. Good for Apple if it was.
I honestly am shocked by the criticism of IOS 27. I have been using it since the first developer beta and haven't found it sluggish or overly buggy. The only bug that still drives me crazy is asking Siri to open an app, which it does, but it don't realize it does so it keeps a banner over the app saying opening blah, until it says there was an error. A swipe up removes it and closes Siri but yeh.
I have to add, I bought a Pixel Fold and Pixel 5 watch. If anyone wants to criticize Apple, they don't know how good they have it compared to Android. I'ms ure I'll get some fluuff from some of you over this, but it still sucks. double tapps can't be tapped as fast as Apples, the watch touch screen sucks all around for Talkback commands, and there are numerous features that we take foregranted on IOS that are just not there in Android. I returned my Pixel devices and now await my yearly upgrade to the latest, the 18 pro max.

From what I heard people are very happy as it has brought there the very noticeable speed enhancement we got around macos 26 and backported to 15, along with some useful quality of life little features.
As for AI... Let's say it, it's here to stay. I had a very good experience to get a refundwith amazon cx ai, in 2 minutes it was done. Even fs companion is imo a good attempt to show where llm can be useful.

Personally, I really don't see what the problem is here. In my view, I wouldn't be overly surprised if the majority of companies out there are now using AI to respond to emails. So what if Apple do it or don't. If they won't do it now they'll do it eventually that's just the simple truth in my eyes.

Yep, AI isn’t going anywhere. If anything it’s just gonna be used more prominently and all companies. I mean Apple‘s gonna be no different. Why do you think they even develop their own apple intelligence. You know all that’s AI. All emails from big companies or Automated. And if they weren’t then they wouldn’t be able to fix all the other bugs that they try to fix. Lol I’m definitely waiting to update iOS 27 for sure. Some of the stuff that got through the Father releases a pretty big deal for me. I’m not gonna say who’s responsible for that because I don’t know, but still not great. I know like everybody I’ve talked to in Apple. I’ve had to call there. It’s been pretty helpful. I really only had like ever one bad experience with anybody on the phone with Apple so I mean that’s saying a lot because I’ve called there real long time. That was basically how I learned how to use. My phone was calling there and then when I found out about this website, I was I’m here. So yeah I know it does kind of feel like sometimes we just get a bunch of replies and nothing‘s really getting done, but I still like to hope that people are trying to get things done. But I’ll be waiting till at least 27.1 to update I think. Well I’ll definitely on my primary device anyway. The secondary device I may update a little bit sooner, but even that’s probably gonna be a while. I’m just not willing to risk a low quality audio profile and I also don’t wanna have to deal with certain buttons in the Phone app since that’s not working right, especially regardless of device. I don’t want my lock screen to wake up your phone and not say anything so yeah I mean that’s pretty basic. If that kind of crap was happening, decided people where they couldn’t see the time when they woke up their phone like I’m sorry, but that would’ve never made a final release. But it does for us. I mean voiceover is our screen. Having low quality audio is basically the equivalent person having a blurry screen. So yeah that’s frustrating for me for sure. And Apple Accessibility emails are always Automated. I may feel like they always were at least ever since I’ve ever had an iPhone and my first iPhone was an iPhone 8 back with like iOS 13.3 something. So yeah.

I fear all accessibility may be facing a sunset, or perhaps a shift in attitude toward disabled people. But I'm speaking from a prospective inside the US, and don't really know how you might view it. I'm sorry our companies are doing this with the AI. It feels crazy, like living inside a Talking Heads song.

I’m just going to say this. All companies are using automated emails. It has absolutely nothing to do with Accessibility whether anybody is taking our needs seriously or any of that kind of stuff. Even the banks send you Automated emails to remind you of things or tell you that you’re withdraw your money or something like that. You get Automated emails from your doctors appointment you get automated emails from anywhere else. This literally has nothing to do with Accessibility. Even the regular Apple customer service is going to send you Automated emails. Automation and companies has been a thing for a very long time now way before AI ever came into existence. It’s not going anywhere. If anything it’s only going to get bigger. I think what’s really going to show this as if there’s possibly more of a chance for disabled users to be working, maybe in the companies that make Accessibility so that they could maybe test things more frequently than just on a beta cycle of a software. I don’t know that could ever be a reality, but that’s the best thing I can come up with at this point if you’re not concerned about it. I’ve actually looked into working for Apple Accessibility at one point. The thing that really kind of made me change my mind about that is that the software to share the screens of Apple products isn’t actually accessible for us. You’d have to be able to see what somebody’s screen is doing and they’re really isn’t away for us to do That. The other thing that put me off from working with Apple Accessibility is that you’d have to know a little bit about all of the Accessibility features and not just voiceover. I just filled that that was just going to be way too much for me. I’m not saying that it’s not for anybody it probably is there probably are some blind people that work there. I’m honestly not aware of any, but it doesn’t mean they aren’t. It’s actually interesting because there was one person that I talked to in Apple who’s completely sided and uses their phone with voiceover. Interestingly enough, they actually found it easier. It’s literally the worst that they told me. They said it was kind of fun to use voiceover because a lot of people don’t know about it and they were able to explain it to people when they would ask them why their phone was talking. And yes, he actually did say he found using voiceover easier. I have no idea how but that’s what he said and yes, he was totally excited. I confirmed that on a phone call. It was kind of interesting. I don’t know how many people in Apple Accessibility use voiceover a lot or just maybe testing once in a while but I do know that they’re training is that they have to turn on screen curtain and actually learn to use voiceover so they are really using it the way we are when they are trained on it. Look I get that it’s not the same as Voice being used daily but you know what at least it’s a starting place. All we can do is keep reporting issues and keep our devices updated as possible and constructive and I guess that’s it. See how things go.

You're right, Singer Girl.
To clarify, I've come across a shift in some, perhaps too vocal, able-bodied people who have turned against things like the ADA laws. It scares me. There were once what were called the "Ugly Laws" in some US cities that were designed to prevent disabled people from being in public. Looking odd in public could be a crime, and I'm hearing a little of that lately... or griping about the necessity of wheelchair ramps and such.
I was just trying to express to Oliver that things are sometimes a madhouse here right now. That I wish it didn't bleed over to the other people of the world when our technology companies start moving in a not so positive direction because they are very much talking about replacing people, whole scale, with AI. It may only be my fear speaking.

I've only had one instance where I received an AI response from support and that was very positive. Anyone who has chatted with a chatbot like ChatGPT or Gemini knows that they do a very good job of understanding plain English (and maybe other languages) and respond with very appropriate responses.

On the other hand, I've had a great deal of experience with communicating with support staff via phone or email. In both cases, but especially email, the responses seldom actually answer the question or address the issue. Often these days, I think that's attributable to a language barrier, but that's another issue.

In my single experience where I knew I received an AI response, I had written to support clearly describing the issue, including the steps I'd taken. The response came back with an actual answer to my issue and explanation of what occurred and why. And to top it off, I received the response in about 3 minutes, despite the fact that it was a Sunday night.

It was blatantly obvious that the AI read and understood my entire message, something that rarely happens when talking to human support staff, in my experience. Once I thought about it, this made sense. It's much easier to train an AI than a bunch of low-paid humans who may not even speak English as their primary language. Bottom line, I'd much rather get a response from a well-trained AI than from a person who can neither understand nor clearly speak English.

I don’t remember when this started, but I’ve definitely been getting a bunch of emails from Apple when I have had questions with the case number and then some kind of article that didn’t necessarily always answer my questions. I mean, I don’t love that to be honest. I think my Apple experience as far as the phone support though has been pretty positive. I did have one bad phone support experience with Apple, but that was literally one time and I called them a whole bunch of times. So here is my Apple not great experience story. I had called for something with the phone. I honestly don’t remember what now. Yes I do actually sorry. There were some kind of bug where if you told Siri that you wanted to write an email to Apple. It would just keep asking you to who and then it couldn’t send an email to the Apple Accessibility email address. So I told the person on the phone what was happening and he literally did kind of yell at me telling me that I shouldn’t have that email address and that nobody was supposed to have that email address and that he could get in trouble if he helped me with this any further and he never gave me his name or anything on this call and he just said well I can’t help you right now and I’ve been working here for a long time for four years and nobody has that email address and he literally just hung up on me after that point. It was crazy. I actually ended up reporting my experience to Apple Accessibility and they did answer back. There was no no Automated reply or anything. They actually like apologized for my bad experience and I gave them the exact date and time of the phone call because I knew the phone calls are recorded so that they could you know this, and who was actually talking to me on the other line so I’m guessing maybe he’s no longer working there. Because I haven’t talked to that same person ever since then. Yeah that was my only really bad experience. I have no idea why he was like that I could do. as soon as I told him it was the Accessibility atapple.com email address he just flipped out. That’s the one he said that nobody was supposed to have. I don’t know why but that’s what he did. It was messed up. And I remember it being like on a Sunday night for some odd reason I don’t know why I remember that but I do.

Y'all knew I'd eventually have to chirp about this :)

Remember the thread where people were all, "this update will be the one where bugs are fixed?"

Even if the new CEO of Apple is an engineer and gets how things should actually work, rather than just what looks good in a shareholder report, this won't happen over night. When Tim Cook took over we really didn't see things shift that much for a few years.

Also, just because a CEO changes it's not like the entire vision changes. I know most of us are begging for scraps, for the nonsense to be addressed, for Apple to put their money where their mouth is regarding being accessibility visionaries and so on. I mean if you can't fix common bugs after numerous people report them, what exactly is the reality of your supposed comitment to accessibility? It's lip service and little more.

This email sounds exactly like something I received in 2012. They totally missed my point when I reported the VoiceOver settings being hosed and needing to use itunes to reenable the accessibility flag for VO. Most feedback emails read similar. Now and in the past. I don't care how the message reads, just test my report and fix it. Heck, don't even bother to write. Just fix it! Acttions speak louder than words ever could.

I do agree though. Apple accessibility has been hit or miss for a long time. Ios was better for Many years, and bugs generally got fixed. MacOS was where the neglect and half-assery was very obvious. This latest iOS26 update is ok, but for a few months there, BSI was super irritating. You would have to re-calibrate every few lines of text sometimes. Before that, I could go weeks without a recalibration.

Like I have stated in other threads, every OS generally has problems. Frankly, I'm not sure how soon I'll be paying Apple another 1200 bucks for a .... Phone! Especially if the needs of disabled users are an afterthought as seens to be the case as of late.

I wish things would change for the better. At the same time, nobody's forcing you to update unless you need a new iPhone. So calm down, wait til the betas for 28 come out, and then update to 27. By then the most ugly and egregious issues should be fixed. That's basically how it always works. Well unless your Microslop. Those morons are just ridiculously bad at everything these days.

Peace and relaxation to all :)