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Ask HN: What's the best mobile phone for visually impaired people?

by athesyn on 10/9/17, 2:23 PM with 2 comments

My dads vision has degraded over the past 10 years to becoming legally blind and up until recently he's always used an old flip phone with the text size set to maximum. I think he was mostly using memory when using the basic features but he still would ask me to help him with the more complex tasks.

His old flip phone recently broke and he asked me to find him a new phone that's more modern. I honestly don't have a clue where to start when searching for accessibility for phones, so I hope HN can help with this.

  • by robmc_ on 10/10/17, 2:57 PM

    I'm not sure if his needs are more for magnification or of he needs something more so I've documented some information for different types of support.

    The built-in screen reader to iOS devices is called VoiceOver and there are many tutorials on YouTube for how to use it. Apple documents a great deal of info on their site for VoiceOver as well as other accessibility options for visual needs. In addition to the screen reader, the iPhone also supports inverted colors, screen magnification, and many other options. If you have an iPhone you can poke around in the Accessibility settings (Settings -> General -> Accessibility).

    https://www.apple.com/accessibility/iphone/vision/

    iPhones are by far the most preferred device for mobile screen readers. WebAIM conducts surveys regarding the most used devices for screen readers which you can review to see adoption.

    https://webaim.org/projects/screenreadersurvey6/#mobile

    Android devices also have many accessibility settings but I'm partial toward iOS.

  • by blink183 on 10/10/17, 2:48 PM

    You might find this site helpful: https://www.gari.info