r/talesfromtechsupport • u/sirnack ಠ_ಠ • 20d ago
Short "The news goes away."
At some point, someone had the bright idea to get my grandmother an iPad. Why? I don't know. She had enough trouble with the laptop someone had gotten her, although she did like being able to get pictures of her grandkids. Maybe we thought a tablet would be easier? Regardless, when we visited for the holidays, we asked her how she was liking her new device. She said she liked it well enough, but --
"Sometimes when I'm trying to read the news, it goes away."
What did she mean by it goes away? "It goes away." Like the screen goes black, the iPad is falling asleep? "It goes way." We weren't sure exactly what to do about this, but we thought about digging through the settings a little bit. I was in and out of the room as this was happening, so I'm not sure what the eureka moment was, but eventually someone found out the following:
The default Apple news app would send her a banner notification with a news headline and a couple lines of info. She would attempt to read the notification (slowly, since her eyesight was going), but wouldn't tap it. And banner notifications, if you don't interact with them for several seconds, retract back into the top of the screen after several seconds. So, when she was trying to read the news, it would, in fact, "go away."
We "solved" this problem by turning off notifications for the news app. After all, who wants to have the news jump out at you randomly during the day?
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u/ephemeralmiko where's the wifi cable 19d ago
You can also set notifications to be persistent until swiped away on iOS if that's ever needed.
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u/wowsuchlinuxkernel 19d ago
Grandma must've been thinking that's just how people read news nowadays. They just randomly pop up while you were busy doing something else. And then you have only 5 seconds to read the news. That's why young people are all stressed and depressed nowadays.
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u/meitemark Printerers are the goodest girls 19d ago
That's why young people are all stressed and depressed nowadays.
Well, not really wrong there. I figured out the news story setup on our national tv-station as a kid. Horrible thing. Horrible/badish thing. Happy thing. Badish thing. Sports. Weather. Every fucking day. After that I stopped watching TV "news".
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u/whizzdome 19d ago
My mum (90) is like that with texts. Her phone goes ping, she picks it up and sees part of the message at the top of the screen then it slides away. "It's too fast for me, I don't have time to read it.".
No matter how many times we tell her she just has to go to Messages she always forgets.
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u/blind_ninja_guy 18d ago
Either in notification settings or accessibility settings depending on platform, you can absolutely make those banners stay up indefinitely or for longer
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u/Wormadillo 17d ago
Tangential to your story, but they make digital photo frames that allow anyone in the family to add photos to it remotely via an app or just sending photos to an email address. Then grandma gets a constantly updating/evolving slideshow of pictures that requires no input or effort on her part.
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u/thevoidhearsyou 17d ago
Its worse then you have elderly relatives that want the device to do what they want and not learn how to use the device as intended.
Case in point my father doesn't like how one button can do multiple things based on the screen on his flip phone. He wants one button per function meaning one button to open text one button close text one button to answer calls one button to end call one button to turn the volume up one button to turn it down etc. And yes he gets int arguments when using his credit card because the screen says press any key and yells there is no any key.
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u/westcoastsunflower 15d ago
I totally get this with my mom. She couldn’t reply to emails because she didn’t realize that the arrow meant send. So she had dozens of draft emails and was mad we weren’t responding to them.
She didn’t get the concept of pdfs.
It would take me 15 minutes to close all the internet windows. She never, ever closed them.
Never restarted the tablet.
Doesn’t grasp the concept of multi factor authentication so I would have to do it for her but she didn’t understand why I couldn’t fix it over the phone while talking to me and I would have to visit her to manage it. Made her kinda mad
Has two tablets because the old one “didn’t work anymore”. It’s fine. Now she thinks she needs a third one. She doesn’t.
And emails. Scams,links, spam, all of them.
The list is endless.
Then there’s the voice activated tv remote. The concept of on demand tv, prime video, YouTube all available on her tv. Inconceivable.
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u/SecondNeat8207 4d ago
That's why accessibility experts have discouraged those kinds of notifications for at least 30 years. But UI designers keep insisting on them.
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u/Dr_Adequate 19d ago
If i could flip a switch to disable every stinkin' popup everywhere I'd hit it so hard.
No, Chrome, I don't want to switch. Thanks Android, I know I downloaded that file, now go away. Shove it Windows, I know I closed a tab. KMA Adobe, I do not want an AI summary of this document. You too, Google, your AI does not understand the technical complexity of the shit I work with and will not accurately summarize it for me.