There are far more uses for smart phone and tablet apps that Flappy Bird and Facebook.In fact, many apps are now helping to solve everyday problems for people with mobility, visual and hearing impairments. Here are our top ten:
1. Siri and other virtual assistants.
For less able iPhone users Siri can be a really good way of keeping organised or to find out pretty much anything you want to know. It’s all voice activated so you can send texts, make calls, get directions/find local businesses, play music or ask any question you like, all without ever touching the screen. Siri is an established tool, that most people are probably familiar from adverts on TV.
But for people who use other types of smart phone there are now Siri alternatives, though none quite reach the same standards. Skyvi, the leading (and free) option, is essentially Siri for Android, following voice commands and helping to organise everyday life. It’s a handy tool that you could really appreciate.
All these virtual assistants can be really handy but please be careful not go all Joaquin Phoenix, in Her, and fall in love with one!
2. Wheelmate
Wheelmate is the app that shows you the nearest disabled accessible parking space or toilet wherever you are. It’s a socially powered app that relies on its users to update it, by adding and verifying locations and currently has more than 30,000 locations across 45 countries. It looks like a useful tool, it’s free to download and they’re trying to cover an awful lot of ground, so they could do with contributions!
3. Sound Amp
For people with hearing impairments the Sound Amp Lite works as a handy budget hearing aid. All you have to do is open it and plug in your headphones for it to work. You can hear surrounding sounds more easily and adjust the volume in the room. The Sound Amp Lite is 69 pence and is the most popular hearing app in the App Store. There are similar apps in the Android store to search for but none are quite like this.
4. Proloquo2Go
At around £149.99 this is an extremely expensive mobile app, but it’s also a very advanced one which could make an enormous difference for people who have difficulty speaking. By touching on-screen buttons representing common actions and requests, or typing into a predictive text keyboard, the app can generate natural sounding speech. The app has won awards, is hugely customizable and aids people with autism, cerebral palsy, Down syndrome, developmental disabilities, apraxia, stroke, or traumatic brain injury.
5. Med Helper
This is a godsend for all those very many people who can’t, whatever they do, seem to regularly remember to take their pills at the right time. Med Helper can manage complex medication timetables, tell you what pills you need to take when, when you’re about to run out of pills and store information on when your next doctor’s appointment is. To some people an app for this might seem a little bit OTT but many others will know just how easy it is to forget to take pills and that it’s even easy to forget to set an alarm to remind yourself. Good value at £2.99 (and less if you don’t mind putting up with adverts).
There are quite a few free text to speech apps available but we’ll use this Text To Speech Toy as an example. You can insert a piece of text into the app’s text box and it will dictate it to you. In this particular case the app is marketed as a hilarious gimmick for messing around on, but it can be a useful tool for people with visual impairments.
Dragon Dictation does the reverse of the Text To Speech Toy. Rather than reading text out loud, you speak into your phone and this app writes down what you say. For people who find using smart phone or tablet touch screens difficult this can be a quicker, easier way of getting notes written down.
8. Nightcall
A really simple but potentially hugely helpful app. This just puts one big red button on your phone’s screen in case you need assistance. The big red button then links directly to one emergency contact number of your choice. It can be used as a simple alternative to expensive mobile telecare services. There are other apps which attempt to do something similar to Nightcall but this is the most simple and easy to use, which is really what you want and need in this instance.
9. Color Namer
Our american cousins may not be able to spell colour properly but, you have to hand it to them, they are good at developing apps. This colour naming app is good fun and handy for anybody with colour blindness. Use your device’s camera to point at something and the app will tell you what colour the object in your crosshairs is. Again, other options are available but this is free and has a good system with loads of different colours stored on it.
10. Blue Badge Style
You may have guessed that this was coming – we couldn’t leave the BBS app out of our own list! The Blue Badge Style app works as a” Michelin-like” star system for the less able. It identifies cool venues near your location and uses a bespoke three tick rating system to grade it out of 5 for each category: 1.Access, 2.Facilities and 3.Style, so that users know exactly what to expect from each venue. You can then easily see the best places near you, read a review, check the Blue Badge Style rating and get directions on how to get there.