Tablet for visually impaired

[Rover321]

My Father is 92 and losing his eyesight. How hard is it to control an ipad with voice commands and to get it to speak the contents of a news article or an email or to send an email or listen to music or radio station? Can a totally blind person use one? How hard is it to connect a charger?

 

[quikah]

Should be fine

http://www.apple.com/accessibility/ipad/vision/

 

[Commodus]

On the charger front: it's standard USB on the power brick side (not an issue if you leave the cable connected to the power adapter), and Lightning is reversible so you don't have to be finicky about which side goes up.

(Come to think of it, I haven't seen an Android tablet with USB-C outside of the Google Pixel C)

 

[TheStu]

On the charger front: it's standard USB on the power brick side (not an issue if you leave the cable connected to the power adapter), and Lightning is reversible so you don't have to be finicky about which side goes up.

(Come to think of it, I haven't seen an Android tablet with USB-C outside of the Google Pixel C)

They could also get a USB-C to Lightning cable, have it be reversible on both sides (they'd obviously also need a USB-C power brick). But that's only useful if they plan on moving the brick and cable a lot. If it's going to stay in one place, just use the brick and cable that come with the iPad.

 

[Roland00Address]

My totally blind uncle (he had sight 20 years ago, he is in is mid 50s, we aka my aunts got him the iphone 3 years ago), he uses his iphone all the time even though he can't see a thing on the screen.

I know he uses the camera to take photos of his physical mail he is sent and have the mail read back to him (aka OCR technology). Same thing with reading e-mails and such.

 

[Roland00Address]

May I suggest prior to giving him the gift that you check out youtube (there are dozens of videos) and insert search terms like blind iphone or blind ipad or voiceover iphone (voiceover is the replacement accessibility option that uses the iphone or ipad in slightly different ways in order for the blind to operate it).

Understand the basic concept prior to buying it for your father.

Then head over to reddit, this forum, or another specifically looking for a few apps for the blind to do what you are wanting to do with the radio and such. Feel comfortable setting this stuff up for your father and showing him how to do it 3 or 4 times prior to giving your father this gift. This is because it is harder to "play" and figure things out if you are visually impaired, and it is not like you can read instructions visually. (Though your father can do so once he gets his iphone set up with that feature for the blind.)

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And also while at youtube google Toph and Blind. Toph is a character from Avatar the Last Airbender a cartoon meant for young adults, she is blind (yet a badass) and there are some good jokes in there on how our society just assumes everything should function but we forget that if you are visually impaired you can't do things THAT way, even if you are an extremely capable individual. Oh Toph is aware of where people are standing and some other location based things via a form of sensory perception based on standing on the ground, aka she is blind but she has a more limited form of "daredevil vision."