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Ask HN: How do I put together a computer for my blind mom?

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Re: Ask HN: How do I put together a computer for my blind mom?

#31

Post by a3n »

a2tech wrote: post #5

The Internet is not blind friendly. It sucks, and we need to do better, but for now, blind people are mostly locked out of the Internet. OS X has some really nice screen reading/accessibility stuff builtin and you can have it do things like read books from the iBook's Store out loud. Mail.app has some support for voice control if you're willing to get it all setup before giving her the computer.

> The Internet is not blind friendly. It sucks, and we need to do better, but for now, blind people are mostly locked out of the Internet.

Really? This day and age? No one in my life is blind, so I just assumed at least some minimally level of accessibility.

I wonder how many blind and sight-impaired people there are in the general population?

Re: Ask HN: How do I put together a computer for my blind mom?

#33

Post by [deleted] »

cmaury wrote: post #19
ArcticCelt wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You may have a much better time with an iphone/ipad/ipod touch The biggest problem with modern intelligent phones, specially apple ones, is that there is zero tactile feedback on the screen vs good old buttons or keyboard.

While this is true, it turns out the lack of buttons isn't as limiting as you might think. You may not have haptic feedback, but you still have the ability to explore the screen using your spacial/tactile senses. By touching the screen and dragging your finger around you can explore what is displayed on the screen. The phone will read aloud the label of what ever item your finger is touching. For an much more in-dept…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: How do I put together a computer for my blind mom?

#34

Post by Someone »

How old? How long has she been blind? How does she feel about it? What does she want in life?

Your best approach should depend on the answers to those questions. Maybe, the best solution is to forgot email and web pages (for now, or maybe even completely (1)) and give her a good way to listen to spoken books.

Contact an expert, for example ONCE if you are Spanish.

(1) that may sound harsh and also sort-of is but it may be the best solution. For example, if she is mentally old and hasn't used computers much, it may be years for her to learn to use a computer. Years that she could have been listening to spoken books, relearning to go shopping, make tea or cook meals, etc.

Re: Ask HN: How do I put together a computer for my blind mom?

#37

Post by sys_admin101 »

Check out Dolphin guide. The software is pretty basic, but it is designed to allow non-computer savvy, low vision, and blind users interact with their computer in an easy to use way. Guide will let you browse the web, listen to music, read documents, check email, and various other tasks. IT comes with English, Spanish, and French speech synthesizers. Below is a link to the trial, and more information.

http://www.yourdolphin.com/productdetail.asp?id=30

Re: Ask HN: How do I put together a computer for my blind mom?

#38

Post by walterbell »

cmaury wrote: post #19
ArcticCelt wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You may have a much better time with an iphone/ipad/ipod touch The biggest problem with modern intelligent phones, specially apple ones, is that there is zero tactile feedback on the screen vs good old buttons or keyboard.

While this is true, it turns out the lack of buttons isn't as limiting as you might think. You may not have haptic feedback, but you still have the ability to explore the screen using your spacial/tactile senses. By touching the screen and dragging your finger around you can explore what is displayed on the screen. The phone will read aloud the label of what ever item your finger is touching. For an much more in-dept…

Thanks for the reference. Has there been research on radial menus for this use case? E.g. touch anywhere in the middle of the screen to define the center of the radial menu, then move in a circle to discover the radial menu options. This would reduce the surface area to be traversed. If we ever get haptic feedback on mobile devices, this could be used to signal transition between "pie slices" of the radial menu.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts's_law

Re: Ask HN: How do I put together a computer for my blind mom?

#40

Post by walterbell »

cmaury wrote: post #8

Unfortunately there isn't a good solution for this, especially on the desktop. You may have a much better time with an iphone/ipad/ipod touch. The interface is much simpler than a desktop, and VoiceOver is much easier to use than JAWS. Apps that can help (there isn't one catch all) Apple mail is pretty simple, and fully VO compatible Voice Dream Reader simple text to speech app that syncs with pocket, evernote, dropb…

http://applevis.com is a community for for blind and low-vision users of Apple devices.
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