Ask Slashdot: What Tablet and Software For a Partially Sighted Person?

RobHart (70431) writes My friend has had both retinas detach, twice. He is legally blind but partially sighted. He has a number of devices that help him read (either by magnifying the text or as text to speech) — but none are really portable. What do Slashdotters recommend (if anything) in terms of a tablet and software that will make it possible for him to do email and read at least some web sites?

Comments

iOS

[Anonymous Coward]

iPad / iPhone. Their accessibility support is top-notch, and you can walk into an Apple store and ask an employee to walk you through it all.

Re:iOS

[davester666]

The main negative is....ebooks... Publishers want to gouge people for having the text of a book read to them, and would rather screw over blind people than permit Apple to read the text of ebooks for no additional charge. Some publishers have some kind of workaround for blind people, so they don't come across as complete douchebags, but the workarounds also tend to be a hassle.

Re:iOS

[arth1]

Yep, this. iOS is second to none in terms of accessibility support.

I'm not too sure. Are there, for example, any Braille readers for iOS, like there is for both Windows and Linux? Or haptic mice? How about something as simple as bitmap fonts at large sizes instead of scalable fonts?
How about text-to-speech or speech recognition in other languages than the most common ones?
Or on-screen keyboards that understand more than one language at a time?

I'd say that Apple's accessibility support is superb as long as you belong to the 80% most common group. But their support of the remaining 20% is abysmal compared to the competition. The one-shoe-fits-all principle doesn't work well. With accessibility, it's better to add something that sucks but can be used than to nix it because it's not good enough. And that's unfortunately what Apple does.

Re:iOS

[anyaristow]

I have a partially-sighted (legally blind) friend who hates touch displays with a firey passion. What she wants most in life is an MP3 player / book reader with a large capacity and tactile controls, which has a clear voice for reading, and which can be loaded from an interface that is not accessibility-hostile (like iTunes) and which will allow her to use content she already has or can get from the public domain.

iPad

[Anonymous Coward]

Love Apple or hate Apple, they do accessibility well.

I can vouch for the iPad

[Anonymous Coward]

My wife had both retinas detach also (due to uveitis), lost vision completely in one eye due to scarring in the re-attachment surgery, had to have DSEK on her only good eye, and she's currently legally blind too (20/200). She's been using an iPad as her "main" computer since the 1st gen iPad (currently on a 3rd gen). The fact that she can pinch-zoom almost every website/email up to whatever zoom level is necessary has been a life-saver for her. For websites that have 'mobile' versions that disable pinch and zoom, the new Mobile Safari now has an option to "Request Desktop Site", which mostly works to request a zoomable, desktop version of the website. Dictation has also worked well for her when she had a flare and her vision was almost nil. On top of that, there's some other accessibility features like VoiceOver and 'hardware' zoom through a triple-tap that she has not needed to use, but they're there if push comes to shove.

Samsung

[denisbergeron]

I have Note 3 and Note Pro 12.2 both have voice read mode and high contrast mode. D ont know if is standard on any other android.

no updates changing things that have memorized

[raymorris]

The one thing that most annoys my client with low vision is updates that cause things to be in different places or look different. Like a touch typist, he relies on memory much more than people with normal sight do. He CAN put his nose to the screen and find the icon for ____, but it's much easier if it's in the same place it has always been.

In short, iOS

[ernest.cunningham]

As others have said, iOS has very good accessibility support. I am developing a system for visually impaired (VI) people to give them contextual awareness in their community. As part of this development process we engaged the VI community to have them test and provide design and testing feedback. Their first piece of advice was that iOS is the preferred platform due to voice over and other accessibility options. So, our system's mobile support is starting with iOS.

Re:In short, iOS

[dougoftheabaci4296]

Seconded. I have a friend who works for the BBC doing accessibility. He and I have had many discussions about accessibility and while I hate to speak for him the general impression I've always had is that iOS has exceptional accessibility support out of the box, especially compared to the competition. Which, of course, doesn't surprise me much given how good OS X is out of the box as well.

Re:Many thanks for the feedback

[quetwo]

Give it a try, but research shows that the iOS devices are much better at accessibility.

On my campus we have "The Research Center for Persons with Disabilities," and they overwhelmingly advocate for iOS devices (iPad / iPhone). The difference is that iOS has the accessibility built into the OS, where under Android, it's up to the apps to support it. Things like Voice-Over, temporary speech, high-contrast mode, zoom, etc. are all OS level functions and don't rely on a single app to provide the feedback. On Android there are accessibility "hooks" that are pretty much only used by Google -- and if you don't have an ASOP device the addons that the hardware partners put in rarely make use of them (meaning some dialog boxes will do speech, some wont. Some critical apps will, some won't).

For e-books there are apps like Voice Dream (again, iOS), that come highly recommended. Essentially, it turns the book reading experience into something like iTunes -- you can scrub through the file, read it back faster,slower etc. It also highlights the words it is trying to pronounce so that if you run across a technical word that isn't commonly annunciated properly, you can zoom in and read it for yourself.