An issue was raised with me the other day about mobile phones for users with special needs, such as people with vision problems, hearing problems, and other such challenges. James Kendrick touches on the subject a little, but the solutions that he found are a little, well, poor.

What I want to see is better integration into the phone’s firmware of tools to help disabled people. While this may not necessarily be practical for regular ‘dumb’ phones, I imagine it wouldn’t prove to be such a problem with smartphones.

Not knowing people that face these kind of challenges personally, I can only speculate what functions would make handsets more accessible to this demographic. I would assume that screen reader functionality would be a great place to start for those with failing vision, and conversely, having more pronounced visual indicators of what is going on with the device would help those with hearing impairments. Enlarged keypads would help greatly for many people, but this isn’t really practical to apply to all handsets - so what about a phone specifically designed for disabled individuals?

I wonder if it would be at all feasible for a large manufacturer to introduce a phone specifically designed to help those that have issues with today’s small and fiddly phones. Surly there would be a market for it, but I don’t know the economics of it all. At least for a start, though, I think manufacturers need to become more aware of this demographic, and I believe that the first company to realize this will get a lot of recognition for its efforts - and maybe even make some money along the way.

Note: I have tried to use language that won’t offend anyone, but if anything in this piece offends you, please contact me and I will amend it.