Cell Phone For the Blind? 141
brigc writes "Here's one that's got me stumped. A friend of mine who is blind asked me for help tracking down a cell phone for him. He's interested in a flip phone with well-defined separations between the keys, and as much voice control as possible. Battery life is the only other thing he mentioned. Preferably something that would work on AT&T's network in the US. We spent part of the afternoon in a local AT&T store checking out all the flip phones they had and didn't find one he really loved. Anyone have any ideas?"
There was a story some months back about a phone that would read to you by interpreting pictures from the built-in camera, but it doesn't have much information about usability. I'm sure it'd be handy to have some sort of text-to-speech option for common cell phone features like caller ID and text messaging, or even just reading menu names.
Why Not Jitterbug ??? (Score:3, Interesting)
Why not Jitterbug. It doesn't work with AT&T but it does have large well separated buttons and is relatively easy for people to use. I don't think your friend wants a "complex" phone -- more buttons and more potential for error.
Here is the linky : http://www.jitterbug.com/phonesDial.aspx
Good luck....
Re:Motorola F3 (Score:3, Interesting)
I think the Motofone is meant to work for illiterate people, but not for blind people. It can read out the menu options, but I think it can not read out phone book entries. However, the phone should work well for sight-impaired people as all text is large and easy to read.
AT&T's own page on the topic (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Here's a possibility (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:pointless (Score:1, Interesting)
A co-worker of mine has a deaf wife and his sister is blind. Both happened late in life, over the age of 40 to both women, and finding a usable mobile phone for both of them is something he's spent a lot of time investigating.
Their lives have gone on - they're still trying to raise their kids, work and live in the world with everyone else. Without mobiles, both would be cut off from the world, as this is how most people communicate today.
The deaf woman has a mobile phone that works for her - a smart phone - but the blind woman has yet to find one that is completely satisfactory for her. One of her problems is that as you state, she just wants a phone to make calls, and the more sophisticated phones are a problem. Camera phones mean there are more buttons that can be accidentally pressed and not all mobile phones are hacker friendly - sometimes you can't change the function of buttons on the phone.
But please don't count these people out, just because they are blind, deaf or whatever.
I work in this area (Score:5, Interesting)
If you're blind and looking for a good phone look at the Nokia 6810... it has a good screen reader and an open source GPS system for navigation called Loadstone (which I did some work on).
For a blind user, bluetooth is a must as it lets you keep a headset with a reader for interfacing. I walked around for a while with the phone talking to me and it freaked people out.
Good luck on the search and message me if you want some more info...
Working with the people (Score:3, Interesting)
I do not at all make claims to understand a blind person's needs, but I have spent some time trying to understand a blind person's requirements as part of working for a company that makes products for blind people - a highly successful company that must be doing a few things right.
One big thing I noticed is that most blind people are highly motivated to adapt to existing technology and generally don't need a big helping hand (unless they became blind very late in life). One blind guy I spoke to can Braille faster than I can type (ok not such a big challenge as I'm not a fast typer). This guy would learn how to use a candy-bar phone pretty quickly, but would likely prefer some special bumps/touch on some of the more important keys [5 to locate center of number pad, dial/hangip keys etc].
Most voice feedback is pretty crappy for blind people. Most blind people don't care for high quality spoken sound. What they want is fast. Most blind people will crank up the speed on their text to speech devices to full speed and at those speeds Joe Average non-blind person will not be able to understand.
What would be very interesting would be a blind person's special interest group adopting an open (eg OpenMoko) or semi-open (eg. Android) phone and seeing what sorts of UI design etc come out of that.