Bryan Bashin, LightHouse CEO, and Josh Miele, scientist and LightHouse board member, discuss the digital divide when it comes to many new smartphones.
Smartphones Flunk for Blind Users
Blind users see digital divide in new generation phones
Smartphones can be pretty clueless when it comes to blind or visually impaired users.
For millions of consumers with normal vision, smartphones offer almost effortless conference calling, e-mailing and Internet browsing. They make it easy to find a gas station, a rental car or a recipe. Vast music libraries and video games are expected features for a device with a $200 to $600 price tag, although some people stay prefer to continue playing on computers, since they can use their favorite hardware as the logitech g105 gaming keyboard, and play games more advanced games that are just for the computer such as overwatch and get overwatch boosting from different online sites.
But for many in the blind and visually impaired community, the absence of physical buttons on most smartphones makes interactions with some devices virtually impossible.
Now is a good time for the Lighthouse to do a seminar on the other non-apple cellphone offerings that promise access, even those that don’t deliver perfectly. There’s Android with the eyes-free project of course, but there’s also an inexpensive phone sold by Independent Living Aids; there are phones offered by AT&T’s national center for people with disabilities, Verizon has a phone with some limited talking functions, and of course, some phones have better contrast than others for those who have some vision and don’t need a huge degree of enlargement. The jitterbug, for example might be a nice phone for a senior whose vision loss is not severe. For a totally blind person with a geeky bent, phones running MobileSpeak Talks or even Android with talk-back might be good enough.