You can put it in control center and have it be about as easily adjustable as brightness. It‘s not there by default and hard to discover, but adjusting your text size all the time really is a bit of a niche feature.

I‘m really not sure what else Apple could do other than:

- Asking during onboarding

- Putting it in Display as well as Accessibility settings

- Having a control center button

This has no basis in reality. Putting a feature like this upfront will cause more accidents than it will allow people with vision issues to use it frequently. People with vision issues need almost all text to be larger. These same people will be the ones accidently hitting this bar instead of brightness and not knowing how to fix it.

I have very bad vision and I use the feature regularly but I imagine I‘m like 1 of 500 people. Accidents are not an issue though since I oversold it being as easy as brightness. You need to force press the icon before you can slide up/down.

I really like this idea. Actually, I have it in control center on my iDevices, but I’m not sure if I had to turn that on.

I don't think so. What's important for setup is not important everyday. Some things you just need to be able to set once and forget. No reason to put those things front and center.

Language? I'd quite like to be able to change that frequently. I see no good reason to have mono-culture enforced by the OS. There are three languages spoken in my household, by various family members. Changing the language dynamically for them would be a benefit, not a hindrance.

Text size? Same - I often have to show something to my elderly family members, but digging deep into the menu's to find the Text Size setting is very distracting.

I think what's happening in this thread is that people are simply attempting to justify bad design decisions without thinking things through. Language should be something you can change, with ease. Same with text size. Ditto, Wifi access, etc.

>Language? I'd quite like to be able to change that frequently. I see no good reason to have mono-culture enforced by the OS.

That's an outlier request, if I ever saw one, and the accusation is absurd (they give localizations for the OS and tons of things like Siri for dozens or hundreds of languages, so to say they ..."enforce a mono-culture" because they don't allow one to see Spanish one day and French the next on the menu" is contrived at best.

The vast majority of people just don't change the language frequently, and wouldn't do it even if it had a dedicated rotary switch on the side.

If that's the best argument, Apple is doing pretty well.

>>Language? I'd quite like to be able to change that frequently.

> That's an outlier request, if I ever saw one

I've lived in similar households. In KDE one can change the language on the fly for any arbitrary application or the desktop manager.

The Russian-speaking girlfriend, the Hebrew-speaking children, and the Spanish-speaking regular can all use KDE comfortably. I was actually surprised when I had to use an English-language Windows machine and could not change the language on the fly.

It's not an outlier for me. Most people I know switch between English for work and international friends and the local language for mostly everything else.

I'm switching languages I type in every whatsapp conversation.

On an older Android version that doesn't track per chat language, I have to switch the keyboard every single time. Three languages. And I happen to know more.

I switch between languages all the time too. Mostly, I just type whichever language I want, and the keyboard figures out it’s one of the two I use frequently and doesn’t bother me. Failing that, there’s a button next to the dictation button to change languages if autocomplete is acting up (this whole post was written with the keyboard set to Portuguese with only one miscorrection thus far).

You don’t need to change the whole OS’s language to type in multiple languages!

You’re talking about switching the keyboard language, which is easy to do all the time. The parent is talking about changing the language of the entire phones UI, which seems like something you’d do significantly less frequently than changing the keyboard.

Actually, I'd do it frequently if I could, since I live in a multi-lingual household.

> The vast majority of people just don't change the language frequently, and wouldn't do it even if it had a dedicated rotary switch on the side.

The vast majority of users in some countries may never change language, but there are other countries where multiple languages are officially spoken and where even members of the same household have different first languages.

For the phone form factor I would think that maybe language switching isn't as important since most people are not sharing their phones often, but for the iPad it might be more useful to be able to switch languages quickly.

The fact that the vast majority don't use a feature does not make it less important for the people who do. That's the same logic as saying, I don't know, that face recognition only has a false positive rate of 1/1000. If you scan a million people each day you still end up with 1000 people falsely identified.

I switch languages between English (work) and German (everything else) every day. My sister's family is bilingual. I've seen them switch languages back and forth every other sentence within the same conversation. (When I asked the kids why they do that, they told me that some things are easier to express in a specific language.)

FWIW, multi language support has gotten much better but there's still a way to go. Two issues of the top of my head:

- I have my phone set to English. But I want Google maps pronounce street names in German when giving directions. This should probably be a user-configurable option because I can see that it helps people to hear (an approximation of) how a street would be pronounced in their language if they don't speak the local language.

- iOS automatically detects the language when I type in some text. But speech recognition always uses whatever language the keyboard is currently set to. I often speak out notes in German and English and to do that I have to make sure that the correct language is set.

Having a customisable control centre might be good. I often turn mobile data on and off (when I'm abroad), and it's a minor pain going into settings. On the other hand I hardly ever touch Bluetooth, and never use airdrop or airplay mirroring.

You can do this from Control Center.

3D-Touch the widget group with airplane mode and the antenna toggles in it, and it will expand to include a Personal Hotspot control.

Of course, this is completely undiscoverable...

Personal Hotspot is not the same thing as mobile data...I suppose it's possible it's what the parent meant, but unless you meant to say that there was a switch to turn cellular data access for the phone itself on and off there, I don't think that's going to solve the stated problem.

There is an immediately visible cellular data switch (right next to airplane mode) in the control center, as well as a hotspot switch which is hidden behind the 3D Touch.

Mea culpa, you’re totally right about the distinction, I wasn’t reading clearly.

Interesting. Couldn't under ios10, but I've bitten the bullet and downgraded to ios12 and yes, it's right there, cool.

I had no idea widgets in the Control Center responded to 3D Touch/long press.

It is customisable, you know.

I'd like to use different languages for different applications. I'm using Russian and English languages interchangeably on my phone. Luckily many applications nowadays have separate language setting, but not all. That's not an outlier request. I hate that English-dominating CS monoculture that thinks that everyone is like them. It caused great headache of 8-bit encodings which the rest of the world had to deal with for decades, while US didn't even understand what the problem was about, strlen is just fine!

Yup. "ASCII is mostly OK if you're USian and only use English, therefore no problem exists."

It was good enough for UNIX... Heck, it was a big deal when early uucp and Internet links were finally 8-bit clean! (Only 7 bits are needed for plain old English ASCII, and when you were paying many thousands of dollars a month for a T1 (1.5Mbps) connection, using 7-bit was an instant 12% bandwidth boost...)

Which is why then you have to come up with tricks like typing c, instead of ç, eh instead of é and so forth.

Then everyone does it a bit differently and there is this pre-parsing phase trying to understand which idiom people have written the text.

Sure, but that's a historical quirk - epoch time has advanced from 0 a bit ;)

One thing I'd think could be useful would be switching the language based on Touch ID, so family members or partners who speak different languages could pick the device up and feel at home.

I would argue that Apple actively doesn't want to support your two use cases because they'd much rather sell a device to each member of your household and make it incredibly easy to share the page you are looking at between each member of the house.

This is what frustrates me about consumer electronics, that if you have a use case that the vendor doesn't want to support then you'll be constantly frustrated over what could be a simple software change.

>I would argue that Apple actively doesn't want to support your two use cases because they'd much rather sell a device to each member of your household and make it incredibly easy to share the page you are looking at between each member of the house.

Bingo! Apple have acquired immense expertise in applying this anti-pattern.

Language can be changed in the keyboard quickly and easily.

Why? The initial setup is for the things you set once and never need to change. I tell my phone I want it in English during on boarding - and then I never need that setting again.

Eyesight changes over time. People learn new languages, and want to switch. Making these decisions for the user and then forcing them forever is decidedly un-user-friendly.

Or, you know, the person can search for 1-2 minutes how to change the font, when they need to, if and when their "eyesight changes" enough during their years of using iPhones to warranty it.

Better than cramming every such feature as a first priority, and making a UI that's confusing for everyday use.

Or 1-2 seconds. The 3 steps are explained at the top of the Google search:

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=change+font+size+iphone

You didn't read the article? Even though its buried there, in the system prefs, people who need to change such settings still cannot find them. That's the point: the UI is already confusing for everyday use, and we honestly expect better of Apple.

>You didn't read the article? Even though its buried there, in the system prefs, people who need to change such settings still cannot find them.

They can always look them up (online), set them, and forget them. Better than having all such settings front and center over more commonly used settings.

Would you say that everyones grandparents (which mostly could use that setting) are capable of googling tutorials?

Even most young people I know are not able to google things (even if it's some important information they urgently need). Or maybe they just don't get the idea of even asking the internet.

> They can always look them up (online), set them, and forget them.

But they don't. You're a reader of HN. It is fairly obvious that you're the sort of person who, at a point when you need to accomplish something you don't know how to accomplish, will assume that it's possible and start with research. But there are a lot of people out there who will start with the assumption that not being able to see their phone screen so well anymore is just something to put up with. The entire point of this post and discussion is that Apple may not be providing the best experience for those users for whom it would never even cross their mind that changing the text size on their phone is possible.

What operating systems have settings like these in a more intuitive location?

Apple's design of Settings has clearly evolved via accretion rather than any thoughtful and considered design. The fact that something is possible in a UI/UX has no bearing on the fact that it's fundamental design can still suck huevos.

How often do you think this happens? I am through and through an Android + Windows user and hate Apple for certain things but I do have to admit their design decisions are pretty solid most of the time.

It's not like you're learning a new language everyday. Nor losing your eyesight. Keep in mind that the life of a cellphone is anywhere between one and six years, for most tends to be around three (speculation). Isn't reason enough to make it a top priority for people to be able to access language / text size changes in their settings everyday.

Forcing them forever is not the case, IDK where you're getting that from. Language settings and text size / other accessibility settings are in the settings and nowadays ios even has a search function in there.

If an elderly person can't find these settings buried in some menu system, they're as good as set forever.