Removal of Physical Ring/Silent Switch: A Concern for Accessibility - Share Your Thoughts!

Press the button and it says ring. Press it again and it says silent. The directions plainly say to press and hold, and you have the haptics as usual. The thing I really like is that if I'm not sure which mode my phone is in, a quick press will tell me without changing it. To me, that means more accessibility.

I don't have a phone with an action button. But one assumes you push it, and it tells you what the status is. Let's say you have to open the phone first. So what, a couple of seconds vs. however long it takes you to do the switch, let's say half a second? I mean, yeah, it's more time. What circumstances are happening in your life that that extra second and a half or few seconds or whatever extra time you like are so crucial that this is ruining your day?

Now you can change it from flashlight and camera and put the silent button instead. Also tell Siri to turn it off or on. Also control pannel you can go to it.

So, does that mean a sighted person could tell just by looking at the screen if silent or ring mode was on? If not then this change affects everyone in exactly the same way. To me it isn't an issue and indeed I've changed the action button to something else.

A non-issue. If you press it, it says Silent. Press it again and it is back to Ring mode. You're making an issue where there is none. This defeats any
other valid points when people or organizations make issues over non-issues. We need to be careful to not make issues where there is none.

Timeline, two generations now? Honestly, I appreciate the extra options that both the action button end the camera touch control gives me! Welcome to your modern day smart phone bud!

A quick unlock of my phone and a quick hold of the volume up and or down buttons tells me exactly what the phone is in. Honestly, you're making a bigger fuss than what's needed here bud. I have my action set to a shortcut, asking me what I'd like to do and silent / ring is one of the options so I can't exactly tap my action button. Welcome to the modern world.

This change personally doesn't bother me. I feel like with having a physical switch these switches probably got a lot of ware and tear on them causing them to break which lead to this design change.

I love that you brought this up. This is a very reason that I got an iPhone 15 instead of getting anything newer than that because I knew it was the last iPhone with a mute switch. I had a feel of the iPhone 16e and I saw the action button and I didn’t like it. so yes, I think this will be a little bit more difficult to manage from an accessibility standpoint. I don’t think Apple will ever go back to a mute switch so it really doesn’t matter exactly what we think here just like they took away the home button. This is why I kept my iPhone SE third generation because it has the home button still animated switch. And I knew Apple was going to take the other way. I still wanted to meet switch so that’s why I upgraded from the SE to a 15. I will keep both of these ones as long as I possibly can. Even if they don’t get updated anymore as long as they’re still life left in them they will be used. I didn’t like the feel of the action button so I just didn’t get a phone like that. I knew the 15 was still available to purchase from the Apple Store directly so I did that.

Siri. Ask her to turn it off and on. Simple. Long live cats.

I haven't really thought about launching apps because at that point, I just use BSI to quickly type in part of an app I wanna launch, but in short, yes. The shortcut brings up a menu with preconfigured options such as toggling between ring and silent, turn on what's called, sight mode, where it turns VO off an screen brightness to 50 of someone needs to look at my phone for whatever reason. still trying to figure out how to make a shortcut automation to where if voiceover is on, set screen brightness to 0. If anyone has any tips on this, let me know. This also has a DND toggle but I need to fix it. I would also like the state of the toggling silent switch to say what it is currently so if anyone has ideas on how to make that come to life as well, if we can even have states read from within the shortcut control. I have ideas of what I wanna add, for example, first time setup questions letting the users configure what they want to have appeared. I'm quite still a newbie when it comes to shortcuts. I quite do wish that apple would add more flexibility to have the action button be multifunctional because then I'd be able to do lots of more cooler things with out hacking.

Tbh, I don't have any problem; its just takes getting used to; its fine.

As others have already said, this is completely, 100% a non-issue. In fact, I don't even need to unlock my iPhone 16 to hear the status of the silent/ring button. I actually like the button much better. You just press it quickly to hear the ring or silent message, and to switch from 1 state to the other, just press and hold until you feel the haptic and hear the message. It couldn't possibly be simpler.

I can certainly understand the value of the switch. Up is on, down is off. All you need to do is feel it to know the state of it, as opposed to pressing a button and having voiceover confirm it for you. However, the ring switch had next to no utility. It could only do one of two things. Mute/unmute the phone, or lock/unlock its orientation. I'm someone who never changes the orientation of my phone, so that function is essentially useless for me. I also don't change the ringer status of my phone much, and when I do it's fairly obvious when it's in which state as I do allow my phone to vibrate on silent.
I don't use the action button switch much either. At the moment, it's tied to turning on/off voiceover, because I toggle my phone's mute state so infrequently such that having the toggle in the control center is fine for me.

I've gotten used to using the button on day 1 of iPhone 17 now that I'm beginning to work with it. It is what it is. And usually I just use it before hearing a recital, or before a church service, ETC.

I'm not sure how anyone else uses their phone, but when mine is on silent it stays that way. I thought I would have an issue without the ring switch but honestly it's been fine. No accidentally turning all the annoying extra noises back on if I bump the side of my phone. The only down side is that there aren't any good Otterbox cases that let you use the action button so far, which is a much nicer way to turn Voiceover off and on than the triple click.

The only thing I wish I still had in silent mode was the ability to hear my phone ringing. Many iOS versions ago that was an option in silent mode, but not anymore. So my choices are never hearing my phone ring or being bombarded at all times by notification noises I can't turn off if I still want haptic feedback, which I do.

I do agree with your points
It will be indeed a bit difficult to check the ring/ silent with this action button.
I guess the best way is to memorise the last state of your phone with this new design.
But if you really can’t stand that, you could simply go with a iPhone with a physical mute switch such as the 14 pro series or 15 no problem.
Those are really good devices these days.
Personally I was barely using the mute switch on my iPhone 13 so this design change don’t bother me.
I have simply programmed my action button on my 17 pro to toggle on/off voiceover so the action button is seeing a lot more use already unlike my 13’s mute switch with barely any use.
Hope my suggestion will help

Personally I actually like the fact that the Action Button can be customized to quickly perform other tasks including run shortcuts. Having a switch dedicated to switching the phone to silence mode stopped making sense in my case ever since I got my first Apple Watch, because by configuring the watch to be in silent mode and the phone to be in normal mode, I can still enjoy the ringer when I'm not wearing my watch and the haptic feedback when the watch is on my wrist.