Some of them are, at least on Apple's side, but it's always for a good technical reason. Screen recognition is only available on devices that have a neural chip, things that require lidar don't work on devices that don't have lidar and so on.

Google is worse at this, Talkback multi-finger gestures used to be Pixel and Samsung exclusive for a while, even though there was no technical reason for it.

Apple has a different problem, many accessibility features aren't internationalized properly. Screen recognition still has issues on non-english systems, so do image descriptions. Voice Over (especially on Mac) didn't include voices for some of the less-popular languages until very recently, even though Vocalizer, their underlying speech engine, has supported them for years. Siri has the same problem.

At least in the US, they kind of can't be. The disability community is pretty up front about lawsuits.

iOS 17 audio image descriptions for blind people via Image Magnifier should work on all iPhones, but do not work on iPhone SE3 and iPhone 11 Pro. Audio image descriptions do work in iPhone 12 Pro. Lidar in 12 Pro increases accuracy, but should not be mandatory. Hopefully this is a bug that can be fixed, since text descriptions were still functional on the lower-end devices.

Source: purchased devices until finding one that worked, since Apple docs indicated the feature should work on all iPhones that can run iOS 17.

Edit: audio descriptions in Magnifier are non-functional on iPad Air, working on M2 iPad Pro.

That's because the ADA has no enforcement mechanism other than lawsuits, isn't it? Our whole legal disability rights infrastructure is designed to be driven by lawsuits, and sits inert if nobody sues.

That's actually a good thing, especially if there are people specializing in bringing these lawsuits en-masse.

Over here in Europe, where there's no lawsuit culture, some laws (not necessarily accessibility-related, our legislation in that area is far weaker) are violated almost without repercussions. When the government is the only party that can bring charges and the government is complacent / ineffective, nobody actually gets charged and nothing gets done.

There's also the problem of incentives, if you can get a lot of money from a lawsuit, you have a far better incentive to sue and find a competent lawyer. You may even deliberately look for and sue violators as a moneymaking scheme, some companies in the US do this. This puts pressure on businesses to comply with the law. Even if you're piss-poor and never sue anybody, you still benefit.

If this lawsuit culture doesn't exist, the best you can do is write a report to the government and hope they actually act on it. Many people don't know how to write these, and since there's no money in it, getting a lawyer to do it for you is an expense that nobody is going to help you recoup.

The people handling these reports don't help either, they're usually 9-to-5 salaried employees who aren't judged too hard on performance, so they have far less of an incentive to actually pursue cases.

I wonder if that would be legal, at least in the US. That feels like it'd be a violation of the ADA?

It would only be a violation if it's purely software locked.

If it requires a chip that supports specific operations, and entry tier devices have an older chip, that wouldn't be a violation.