Folks: during my stay on this list from last few days, I’ve been able to observe that there are quite a lot of confusions in regards to which phone one should buy, and specially the accessibility of android based phones. Being a user of a number of phones right from symbian second edition to the smartphone breeds, I thought to answer the questions based on my personal observations and experiences if they can help someone in some ways. Like vamshi bro pointed out, choosing a suitable phone has really become million dollar question these days keeping in mind: I phone(costly), Nokia (outdated), Android(confusing) etc. iPhone, particularly is indeed very accessible, but its far too costly than most users shall appreciate to buy. Hence, I’d like to specifically focus on whether one should buy nokia or android, and what specific things one should keep in mind in order to choose an android phone.
well, the answer to that question is indeed difficult, and actually quite subjective to the choice and circumstances of every individual. say, for instance, those who do not have much time/interest to explore and just require a solution that's tried and tested, some phones of nokia are still available in the stock unofficially, that they can buy and start using right away. it, however is the reality that symbian is no more available and no further such phones are being manufactured by the company anymore. therefore, android is the best option keeping the availability, cost and accessibility in mind. about android version, both 4.0 and 4.1 are accessible, none of them is 100% accessible though. well you have to accept the fact that android is comparitively new and while i personally appreciate google's efforts of implementing out of the box accessibility features, it'll obviously take time to jell with the expectations of the visually challenged individuals who as well have diverse needs/requirements depending on their environments and demographics. so, if you choose to buy the android phone, keep the following things in mind: •whatever someone might claim, no android phone is 100 percent accessible as of now, though the statement depends on what tasks you would like to perform with your phone, as a lot of them shall be accessible and a lot of them won't be. •android requires the user to have quite a learning curve and the patience as one might need to install, try and test with a number of third party apps in order to get some tasks done. so if you are not interested/motivated for the same, reconsider your decision. •most of the android based phones that you'll find in the market are touchscreen based. while the android certainly has accessibility features to enable users to use touch screen with screenreaders/magnification applications, i can tell you out of my personal experiences that the best speed and comfort that you can find is to have the phone that has both touch and type available, although i'm fortunate to be able to use 100 percent touchscreen phones as well with quite a reasonable speed. •the tasks like messaging, contacts, phone, music, camera etc are over 90 percent accessible in my experience. •Log is slightly inaccessible in comparision to nokia phone, but still manageable. •GPS works fairly good, and the support of google maps is excellent. •fm radio is slightly inaccessible, internet radios are manageable with the help of third party apps. •There are apps available for emailing, facebook, twitter, skype, call recording, dictionary, daisy book reading and other such basic tasks, which are reasonaablly accessible. •reading word, excel and pdf document is not much accessible as yet. •there are apps for colour identification, face recognition, OCR etc which though are not perfectly developed as yet, but certainly looks promising. •the versions of android shall keep improving, and they really have to. however, the accessibility available in android 4.0 and 4.1 is quite reasonable, and either of them can be chosen with no hezitations as such. even the 4.0, for instance provides you quite a number of options to use the phone accessiblly, and 4.1. only adds the icing on the cake. personally, i did not find much of a difference in 4.1 and 4.2 though. •considering the fact that android does have the in-built accessibility options available, most of the phones that you buy from the market should be usable without much of a configguration. though, i personally found out that some phones of HTC and LG were using a broken accessibility architecture, and did have issues that are not found in many of the companion phones. •rs. 10 to 12 thousand is quite a reasonable amount to obtain a good android phone. fortunately, you've got plenty of options and brands available to choose from, and i don't see a reason why you shouldn't be able to get a good phone with reasonable features in this amount. in a nutshell, the decision to buy or not buy android is completely subjective depending on the above points, and if you've got the courage, learning curve, need and excitement of using an android based phone, go for one, and you'll definetly enjoy it. technologies are changing fast, and android is the most latest option for any mobile buyers including visually impaired individuals if they have to step with the changing trends. particularly about visually impaired persons, i personally advise to go for it if you can, as the feedback from most possible users can only make the good things happened, and only then we, as a group of visually impaired individuals shall be able to turn the stones in our favor by getting more features implemented both by google as well as the third parties. I don’t know if the above lengthy email has helped anyone of you, but if it has helped in any little way, please feel free to write back for anymore questions/queries/doubt that you may have, where you feel that I can help you with. Please understand that above points are based only on my personal observations and experiences which are of course limited and they may or may not be true in your context. Thank you for reading my such a lengthy email, and I’ll be happy to learn from your experiences as well. Please write back with your experiences especially if they add or correct something to my observations written above. Regards, Prateek agarwal. CEO, Daedal technovations pvt. 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