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Sabbath mode and assistive technology features

Eric Bailey writes about the “secret mode that comes with almost all large ovens, refrigerators, dishwashers, and other large kitchen appliances”. Sabbath mode (or Shabbat mode) helps people to comply with Halakha (a body of Jewish religious laws), which forbids Jews from doing “work that creates” on Shabbat (the day of rest, Saturday).

For example, an oven can be set to Sabbath mode to keep food prepared ahead of time hot. The work to create the food and the heat to keep it warm is done outside of the bounds of the holy day.

Sabbath mode is not easy to activate: it “usually requires a very specific, non-obvious, and convoluted set of button presses”. Therefore, it is only used by those who know it exists: “activation is almost always a highly intentional act made by an individual whose background means they know the feature exists and uses it for a very specific purpose.”

Eric uses this as a metaphor for assistive technologies. Many accessibility features built into operating systems are obscure, known only by the people who rely on them. Not every Jewish person knows that Sabbath mode exists, and not every disabled person knows about or is comfortable using assistive technologies designed for their disability.

Eric concludes that it’s important to build accessible experiences by default, and not rely on your users to explicitly ‘enable’ accessibility (such as setting prefers-reduced-motion in a nested submenu somewhere on their OS). On the flipside, people who do set such modes have done so deliberately and rely on them, so don’t remove, override or subvert this functionality.

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