May

16

Cell Phones For The Elderly

Posted by cameron

May 16, 2007 |

Sometime ago I wrote about Windows For The Elderly. It was about features in the Widows operating system to assist those who are vision impaired or had a difficult time with the keyboard. You can read that post here. I decided to take a look at cell-phones from the same perspective. Following is what I found:

Code Factory

mobile-speak.jpgThis is a company that specializes in solutions for the blind or visually impaired. One of its products is “Mobile Speak”, a screen-reading piece of software. I.e. turns text to voice so you can have the screen read to you. They even offer a Braille keyboard. Obviously these aren’t available with all phones so check it out here. Their site lists the phones they work with.

Another product is “Mobile Accessibility” designed for the vision impaired and has the screen reader software to have it read to you.

They have “Screen Magnifier” which increases the on-screen text size.

Their “Mobile Daisy Player” in conjunction with “Mobile Speak” allows listening to a book from the cell phone. This is a pretty nice plus. Have a book read to you no matter where you are, plus the cell phone speaker for taking those calls. All in all these are very useful things to have, plus the benefit of being able to get hold of your parents no matter where they are.

ETO Engineering

This is a company that sells Code Factory Products plus other devices. For example they sell a blue tooth necklace, which transmits to a hearing aid. Grandma will surely wear this one and it will give her hands free use of the phone. You can check them out here.

Apple Iphone

iphone.gifI took one look at the user interface and realized how uniquely appropriate this new product was. The interface is user-friendlier for those who have a hard time focusing on small keypad layouts and screens. The touch-screen icons appear to be larger and easier to make out than standard keypad arrangements. The on-screen keyboard is also larger than the usual cell-phone keyboard. You can see a brief demo at Apple’s website by going here. Because the whole phone is a screen, text and pictures are larger and easier to see. Compare the two phone images above. The other side of the coin is that there are so many wiz-bang features that it may scare grandma. My wife, a grandma many times over, immediately said, “I want one!” after watching the demo video below. You can’t beat that.

Lastly, this phone is so darn cool and different from anything else out there. Catch that if you can Microsoft. Apple is on a roll. Check out the video below:


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