Thank you! For a few years now, while trying to help her with her diminishing vision, I’ve been amazed at how hard it is to find electronics that work well for older folks with poor vision. Whether it’s an extra-loud, large-button phone with 15 extra buttons for her to get mixed up with, a supposedly-made-for-old-people answering machine with several menu buttons that interrupt its function, or a coffee maker that requires you to hit one button, load the coffee pod, then hit three more buttons, all in the correct order, unless water is low, in which case you refill it then do them in a different order. Easy for most people to get used to, but hard when you received it after going blind.

I feel like all this stuff needs like, two interfaces. The one she uses which needs to be simple and tactile, and the one designed for a tech-savvy relative or neighbor to configure for them. But it’s all built on basic consumer products with tons of modes and settings, and they don’t want to remove features, and they can’t count on that relative existing, so they split the difference. And they don’t think about how easy it is to accidentally brush the tiny volume slider all the way down and not hear your phone for days.

As for this thing, if I lived with her and could tend to it, I’d say it should be exactly what she wanted. Unfortunately it’ll have to fend for itself for weeks at a time, and any error or crash could erode her confidence in it. I tried to make it resilient and to think about all the ways it could get messed up short of someone dumping tea over the top of it, but we’ll find out how well I did over the next few days. Once I add the next step from the spy device, the transcription (which I ran out of time to add) I’ll try to have it fail in stages - ideally it records, transcribes, and emails out the audio file and the transcription. If transcription fails, it’ll still send out the audio file. If email fails, it still records to the device.