by Shelly Brisbin
AppleVis releases its Vision Accessibility Report Card
AppleVis released its fourth annual Vision Accessibility Report Card, a survey of visually impaired Apple users inspired by the Six Colors Report Card:
This year saw our highest level of survey participation to-date, as well as our highest-ever level of engagement thus far with the low vision-specific questions.
Our survey results indicate that across almost all categories, satisfaction with Apple’s accessibility offerings for blind, deafblind, and low vision users decreased when compared to 2024.
For VoiceOver and Braille users, dissatisfaction with software quality and the presence of long-standing accessibility bugs were overarching themes throughout participant comments. For low vision users, participant comments show that Apple’s 2025 liquid glass user interface redesign had a significant negative impact on the user experience for many.
Overall, AppleVis readers gave Apple a B (3.7 out of 5). That score is down slightly from 2024’s 3.9. The survey asked readers’ opinions of VoiceOver, Braille and low-vision broken out by platform, along with scores for their overall impression of new accessibility features. Respondents also rated user experience with each OS platform and accessibility category.
iOS and iPadOS scored highest in most categories, including VoiceOver features, Braille features and low-vision features, with a 4.2 average for each. iOS and iPadOS user experience also netted 4.2 ratings.
AppleVis users believe Apple continues to struggle when it comes to fixing bugs in VoiceOver and Braille, giving the company a C – a 3.0 rating – in this category, which covers all platforms. Also at the bottom of the ratings were macOS VoiceOver user experience, with a 3.1, and three tvOS categories, which scored between 3.2 and 3.5. Low-vision features in tvOS took the greatest ratings tumble, from 2024, slipping from 4.1 to 3.2.
As usual for this survey, the comments section features a lot of strong opinions.