How retina ipad screens may even help the blind.

By now, everybody knows that the new ipad has a retina screen, which even to my visually impaired eyes, looked stunning. When I first heard about the ipad, I wasn't too hyped about it though, because the graphics and graphics performance were the only big new features, which to a visually impaired, isn't very interesting. But the increase in the number of people reading on retina screens may cause a change, that will be very beneficial to people who requir a screen reader to read.

Paper publisher's inability to change.

Last year, when my mom got an ipad 2, I was very excited. It was the first time that I'd be able to read the Humo, a Belgian magazine, or so I thought. After tripple clicking the home button to activate VoiceOver, I put my finger on a large piece of text, which was immediately followed by the disappointment of hearing the clicky noise you hear when you put your finger on a place where VoiceOver has nothing to read.

Not knowing much about magazines in the news stand, I tried another magazine, with the same result. I became suspicious about the way magazines published their content to these devices. After doing some research online, my suspicion proved right: to keep the pixel perfect control about the layout of their content, these magazines sent huge images to their readers, which is not a problem for sighted people, because the text is visible as usual. This only becomes a problem when you try to select text, or, as I found out, try to read it with voiceOver.

What these magazine publishers don't seem to get, is that people want to consume media in the form they prefer, not the form the publishers prefer. This is also shown by the increasing popularity of apps like instapaper or readability.

Publishers need to accept that on an iPad, their magazine will look different from the same edition viewed on an HD Television, but also know that people might want to view their content in a text-based browser. The fact that so many types of devices are now connected to the internet, makes it possible for people to read in whatever way they like, if publishers would make the content plain text. I've sent Humo a message, both via their website, and on twitter. On twitter, I got the typical "We'll look into it" response, and I haven't heard from them since.

Retina displays and bandwidth limits to the rescue!

People who have used the new ipad, will know that content that doesn't have a high enough resolution for the retina display, look worse than they would on a lower-res display. This is especially noticeable on the web, where many sites just give you images with normal resolution. Magazine publishers probably don't want their magazines to look bad on the new ipad, but shoving an image with 4 times as many pixels als they used to have down people's wifi, and possibly 3G, or LTE connections, will not make for a nice reading experience either, making for download times in which you could make a trip to the moon and back, and still see the spinning loading icon, and making you reach your download cap by downloading 1 magazine, and a lolcat picture. My hope is that publishers will finally start adopting plain text formats such as HTML, or ship their magazines in the ibook format or as pdf. This way, they'll give their users a much better reading experience, and avoid articles like this one,this and this one.