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Comment by thathndude | Hacker News Reader

This is an interesting take, and a very salacious headline.

I’m a lawyer who represent a number of disabled individuals (including the blind). My clients with vision impairments as all in on Apple products, saying that the accessibility features are head and shoulders above other options.

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I switched from MacOS to Linux/Wayland after 10 years on MacOS because it accommodated my vision impairment better.

Because I have cataracts, it helps to make everything on the screen bigger. MacOS can do it, but the result is blurry unless the scaling factor is exactly 1 or exactly 2, and choosing 2 reduces the horizontal resolution too much for some web sites. (My monitor is 1080p, so with a scaling factor of 2, the viewport is only 960 pixels wide.)

In contrast, Linux/Wayland offers scaling factors 1.0, 1.25, 1.5, 1.75, 2.0 and 2.25. (I've been using 1.75 for months.) Windows works similarly to Linux/Wayland (though apps that have not been updated to work with recent versions of the OS end up blurry), so MacOS is definitely a laggard here.

MacOS 10 used to let you specify scaled resolution in Control Panel >> Displays >> Resolution (scaled). It doesn't give you numbers, though, more like "larger text" and "more space", with "effective resolution" under the image. The effect is a scaling factor, though, you just can't see the actual value. I expect macOS 11+ also continues to do this.

Sure, I know. That is the blurry option. There is a free utility that causes choices with "(HiDPI)" at the end of them to show up in the list of possible resolutions even when using a non-HiDPI monitor, and that is how you get a non-blurry scaling factor of 2.0 on a Mac.

(Also, it hasn't been called Control Panel for 20 years.)

> but the result is blurry unless the scaling factor is exactly 1 or exactly 2

I can’t relate. I’ve been using a scaling factor of 1.5 for about a decade now (4K monitor scaled to 2560x1440) and it’s never blurry.

It is not as sharp as it could be, and someone on this site once commented that he notices the difference (between Mac and Windows, where the software doesn't introduce blurriness) even on his 4K monitor.

(You could ask me why if I hate blurriness so much, why am I still using a 1080p monitor. My answer is my high-DPI monitor is coming soon.)

Sounds more like personal preference than something objective. Windows’ 1.5 scaling on the same monitor looks pretty bad to me (font hinting in particular, legibility isn’t great).

I chose not to scale windows but to deliberately go lower screen resolution on my 4K monitor and aliasing is minimal, almost unnoticeable. Great for coding. For gaming though, I switch back to native 4K resolution. All this while windows' software scaling remains 1:1.

Although I've used the "Display" tab of the "System" pane of the Settings app in Windows 10 to change the scaling factor (labeled as "Scale and Layout"), I cannot make sense of your comment.

Every time I tried to scale windows UI in "software" way, as you just described it, I would encounter bug after bug after bug either in windows or apps or taskbar. After a realization that windows will never get UI scaling right, I decided to do "hardware" scaling, meaning, I still keep my windows scaling at 100%(recommended), but then I set the display resolution to a compatible lower one. My monitor is 38" and it's native resolution is 3840x1600. But when I set that resolution, there is no way in hell I would be able to read the fonts of the screen. So, instead, I set my resolution to 2560x1080, which doesn't look blurry, scales perfectly, and zero UI bugs.

OK I see now.

Mac really only works in the ~110 or ~220 ppi sweet spots which most people don't realize. The only monitors I've seen that fully work are the LG UltraFines and the Mac displays. I'm on a ThinkVision display now and it's middling.

Oh we love our iPhones. But then as a computer OS, we get Windows. Some people try to stick with Apple, either because of Logic Pro or the M1 chip, but I'd say a good 85% of blind people that even have a computer in the first place, have Windows.

I have worked with some people in the local blind community in my city here in Denmark. They all use Windows even though I see lots of iPhones.

It's best to refer to those with disabilities as people rather than their disability, EG, 'blind People' rather than 'The Blind'.

Also, this is talking about voiceover on Mac OS, which is a specific aspect of apple's accessibility solutions. For the most part, IOS on iPhone and iPad OS are better than that of android, though not without their issues. The issue at hand, however, is very real and, for professionals, highly inconvenient.

Am I gonna have to put :blind: in my username here too? Anyway I'm blind and I'm a blind person, and a good many blind people like being called blind people, because it's shorter, and doesn't minimize the way blindness effects us. Anyway I was responding to someone that said something like blind people use Apple or some such, my point being that we do love our iPhones, but for computers we use Windows. And just in case you didn't get it, I'm blind too.

This is definitely true in the case of phones, but not for computers. NVDA on Windows is excellent and improving all the time.

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