Apple's forbidden fruit

Apple’s new iPhone 3GS should be a pip when it comes to access. But Geoff Adams Spink, who has a range of access needs, found it less than tasty

There’s an old axiom in accessibility circles about inclusive design being better and cheaper than retro-fitting. The people at Apple don’t seem to have taken this on board.

First, Apple has to be congratulated on being the first mobile handset manufacturer to build a screenreader and screen magnifier into every device. All the user has to do is to enable them from the accessibility menu.

And the iPhone itself is a beautiful piece of technology: it’s weighty, smooth, curvy in all the right places and feels like something that technophiles like me just have to own.

In computer terms, I tend to go for magnification rather than screenreaders (software that reads out what’s on the screen) so my first stop was to enable the Zoom feature on the iPhone.

I was soon in trouble. Moving around the screen with the magnifier needs three fingers and I’m not well endowed with fingers. Turning the Zoom on and off also needs three fingers, and so does the task of putting the magnification level up and down. So ten out of ten for accessibility but null points for usability.

It gets worse. I decided to try VoiceOver, the on-board screenreader. Apple’s boffins obviously decided to avoid confusion by creating a different user interface from the regular one. This means that when VoiceOver is switched on, a single tap on the screen merely identifies an element (rather than activating it) and a double tap is required to activate it.

The double tap needs to take place quickly – you have to be quick on the draw – or else it just repeats the description of the thing you’re trying to open or use, and I couldn’t find any way of adjusting the double tap speed. And when it comes to using the keyboard to enter words for a text or email, the experience is so frustrating that a cushioned rubber cover for your iPhone may come to be an essential accessory. I tried typing a three-word text to someone and gave up after five minutes.

On the plus side, the accessibility menu has a feature that reverses the colours, so you get white text on a black background. This makes such a big difference to someone with my degree of vision impairment that in some cases I didn’t need to use the Zoom.

The phone also has a handy voice control that lets you dial numbers and contacts from your address book with just one press of a button. The same feature can be used to control the iPod part of the iPhone as well, so you can tell it to play your favourite James Blunt track – should your musical tastes plumb such depths.

To me, though, it’s as if someone told the design folk at the iPhone 3GS not to worry about accessibility because that was being taken care of by another team. The result is a predominantly inaccessible device with a clumsy retro-fit.

• Geoff Adams Spink is Age and Disability Correspondent for BBC Online