Hey so apparently Apple devices in businesses have been growing over the past decade. Are there any users with positive or negative stories to share as to the accessibility experience in such environments with Apple devices? Like the default accessibility settings are great but I know from friends' feedbacks that MDM can really ruin it. Like someone has told me recently that he was unable to enable voiceover by itself because MDM disabled both siri and the accessibility shortcut.. on managed iPad. Fun fact it was for a disability/blindness nonprofit, but they were outsourcing these iPads.. to a 3rd party.
Especially for the mac and the voiceover experience, etc.
This is purely out of curiosity. I'd imagine that generally IT don't have anything to do as normally getting these devices for us is plug and play where VO is concerned?
Thanks!
By TheBlindGuy07, 31 March, 2025
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Management Side
Not a user of managed devices, no, although it really doesn't surprise me that you can properly bork accessibility support that way, because Apple know control freaks when they see them and there are lots of juicy controls accessible through MDM and arguably many of them should be easier for techies to use themselves.
My interest is the deployment tech from the sysop side of things, of course. Check out Apple's deployment guide and security guide and their platform references for all of the configurable profile keys. The tools available vary but I have yet to find a fully accessible profile editor, and Apple's own configurator is surprisingly weak for profile building. You need a push certificate to run your own MDM push client, which operates through Apple APNS, but that requires an enterprise licence or an old copy of macOS Server (or a reverse-engineered client that uses the same interface as the old Server, which is most certainly not supported by Apple and is barely legal if you don't have a receipt for the purchase of the server at the time). Push email from your own server works by the same method, because of course Apple don't do standard IMAP IDLE or NOTIFY. But if you can get it going then there are FLOSS MDM servers for you to push changes. Or you can use a managed solution like Simple MDM. You get a lot of control that way. macOS Server itself, when it worked, wasn't terribly accessible in its profile manager server web UI either, but it did make this sort of thing easier for mortals to do and I know some diehards still clinging to theirs for dear life just so they can do this at a reasonable price.
Anyway. Not quite the answer you were looking for, but …
School iPad
During Covid-19 time, everyone was required to use an Apple iPad. I never checked if it had a MDM profile but it did seemed to work just fine for me similar to a Apple device that didn't had any MDM profiles.