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Show HN: Giving my mother-in-law an easy internet radio with real icon buttons

bef.no

121–125 of 125 posts

Re: Show HN: Giving my mother-in-law an easy internet radio with real icon buttons

#121
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I spent an hour or so messing with Siri on a Mac Mini I have lying around from an old contract gig. Wondering how I would use it without much (or any) vision. It's directly hooked to a fairly fast lump of hardware and communicating with a potentially huge back-end. Utterly maddening, barely useful, overly tied to Apple products, and it's a design problem I had never considered before. Kind of disappointing after watc…

Siri isn't the same thing as Voice Over/Voice Control! [0] Apple has been frequently recognized for their efforts to make their products accessible - including by the National Federation of the Blind (NFB) [1]. Not to come off as a shill, but their contributions in the area of accessibility are worth praising. iOS was the first mobile OS to include accessibility features. Apparently they're now using the LiDAR scanne…

I've used Voice Over to some extent also (once again, this isn't an exhaustive survey by any means). It does appear to be oriented to people with motor issues more than the blind.

As I've said a couple of times here (mea culpa), my gut feeling is that the philosophy is wrong. By building verbal control systems on top of (over-) visually dense user interfaces, you have to run just to stay in place.

It could be that the answer is an entirely different audio UI for computer management and then the replacement of standard applications with ones that are suitable for audio control (with perhaps a few buttons). Perhaps somebody has made an email app for blind people, but I haven't run into it yet. It certainly wouldn't be Outlook with a robot reading the screen to you. Probably the only way I could understand this at all is to attempt to produce one, writing software has the side effect of forcing you to fully understand a problem.

Re: Show HN: Giving my mother-in-law an easy internet radio with real icon buttons

#122
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Omg 100x yes, the answering UI on modern phones is the pinnacle example of why flat-ui needs to die. It should be the easiest UI to create with only two freaking buttons but still everyone fails so miserably bad. Shape of buttons are identical, colors are very faded and the icons to indicate phone up or down have been flattened so much you can hardly even recognize any of them is a phone. Or even worse are those you…

Considering myself pretty tech-literate, using computers for 3/4 of my lifetime - yet, i've to pause AND think each time i've to answer a Microsoft Teams call which button is going to pick up the call...

Same for me, and in the beginning it happened often enough I am too quick and pressed the wrong one ...

At least make the "answer" button green.

Re: Show HN: Giving my mother-in-law an easy internet radio with real icon buttons

#123
post #110
post #98

I did something similar for my kids, but I used Raspberry Pi’s running MusicBox, which can do internet radio, Spotify, local MP3s, or in my case load a folder of MP3s from a share drive on my network. I threw on a $10 USB DAC and some cheap Logitech Z120 speakers, and I hardwired some big arcade buttons from Adafruit to it. I wrote a little Python script so each button plays an MP3 playlist (Eg one for sleep, one for…

Sounds like a great idea for a blog post :)

Planning on it once I tidy it up a bit. I've got about 10 projects 95% done... as usual.

Re: Show HN: Giving my mother-in-law an easy internet radio with real icon buttons

#124
post #72

I am the family tech support person and I have learned that the things that work best are wired, tactile, and easy interfaces. After COVID hit I set up my father's home office, but recently replaced his bluetooth keyboard with a wired one which eliminates downtime and frustration. My mom likes her iPhone 5S with a real button, and I've enabled accessibility options on her large monitor to show a gigantic mouse pointe…

Keep in mind that the OECD survey is administered via computer. The results may be conservative in representing a lack of computer proficiency.

Re: Show HN: Giving my mother-in-law an easy internet radio with real icon buttons

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By Siri you don’t actually mean Siri, but the accessibility voice controls right? Like VoiceOver or Voice Control? Siri is not an accessibility tool so if you were trying to use it as one it could explain your problems.

I mean both really, and to be sure I'm no expert in it's use. It got me to thinking about all the visual gingerbread on websites and to some extent on applications. From just a cursory look at this world, it would be interesting to design an audio-only interface to a computer rather than one that reads a display to you. That would be a wonderful hobby project, some sort of displayless Linux with a mic and a speaker t…

If you have an iPhone or iPad, have you played around with Siri shortcuts at all? You can essentially create voice-operated scripts that can perform chains of actions on your phone. It's limited, but not as limited as you'd think.
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