OP here:

She also can barely hear, so giving voice commands might work, but understanding the machine-generated audio feedback doesn't work. Also, she can't fix problems, like accidental activation. It's too overwhelming. And that's while she's technologically curious and adopted mobile phones and smartphones to some extent. She just can't use these things properly.

I bet we will have an easier time with these things because we learned how to use them while everything was fine.

His grandmother is 91 years old, and smartphones are complex objects to understand and use, even with assistive technologies. If a 91 year old with normal vision has a hard time using the phone, I don't think adding near-blindness and assistive technology will make it any easier.

You are exactly right.

My mother is 87. She's still pretty sharp, but anything other than a simple flip phone is very frustrating for her. Things just move too fast, too many things "pop up" (like notifications, etc) and she doesn't know the different types of gestures needed to control it well.

Totally! I often wonder how much accidental functional ADHD we are training ourselves to suffer from when I see how elderly people including my granny react to modern tech devices and all the movement, flashes, animations, notifications, ...

Many of us with imperfect eyesight like to read still. With text on a page or a screen. Fonts are (if designed for utility) a delicate art balancing expressiveness and readability. Some hew more in one direction or the other. This one favors readability.

As a blurry eyed person in my midlife period who consumes a lot of written word, text and code I very much appreciate any efforts to make it easier on my eyes and my brain, especially in type that is nice to look at.

There are also customizable fonts like

https://input.fontbureau.com/preview/

I find an extra bit of built in spacing helpful.

Yup! I still use a custom Input Mono for coding.

Wrote a short follow up in case you're interested: https://christiantietze.de/posts/2021/01/voice-assistants-an...

BTW, on the Atkinson page, the link to this page is broken (you included the .md)...

Fixed! Thanks

I really enjoyed both write-ups. Precise, technical and humane at the same time!

Thanks for telling me! Glad I found a tone that rang well

Have you seen a young person have 100% success with a voice assistant, let alone a 91yo? Not a chance I'm sending Granny with whatever my phone thinks 'taxi' is.

Is 100% success your level of success? I think a nice font that assists users with low vision level is an excellent idea which I said and I thought the font was very well designed.

What happens when your vision is too poor to read even the best designed font?

At that point 100% success is an unrealistic level and so a discussion about how smart assistants work or even other assistive functionality is a fair discussion and one the author did not mention at all.

I think failing to some extent is fine, if the feedback is good and the device returns to a clean state. Even on a phone with buttons, she sometimes fat-fingers the wrong button super close to the phone-book-down key and ends up in the main menu, scrolls down 10x, then tries to hit the dial button for e.g. display settings. Phone appears broken because it just doesn't dial, and neither resets itself for invalid input so she could start over. She has no mental map of the various other states the phone might be in, and in confusion forgets that the hang-up button also returns to the home screen. Things are less than ideal.

> Is 100% success your level of success?

Yes. Yes, it is.

For some reason we're sold on the idea of "good enough" for things that are actually "just barely usable under perfect conditions". And this doesn't apply only to voice assistants.

And, like, 100% success or very close to it is fairly standard across the line–if you flip a light switch the light turns on, if you turn a door handle the door opens. When you give someone something complicated and novel and it doesn't even do the thing you say it should do consistently that just tanks confidence in being able to use the thing.

This fellow’s grandmother doesn’t have a mobile device - she uses a telephone. I don’t see the value in making an older adult learn to use an entirely different technology when they just want to be able to call a taxi on their landlines.

Right.

She had a Windows Phone for years because you could zoom-in the tiles and thus increase touch targets for quick dialing. That eventually broke down, too, because of lack of haptic feedback and, well, we all can hardly imagine how hard it is to navigate a device like that when everything's so blurry you cannot see the space between huge-ass tiles on a, what, 6" screen or so.

Intelligent assistants are good at setting alarms.

Other than that, in the real world, they seem to rarely work. You can come up with a curated list and make sure it's all working correctly. But as soon as you do something novel, all bets are off.

Not sure what world you live in but at least on iOS Siri is highly accurate and can interact with enough of the system that it is highly useful.

In the original post's case calling contacts is a trivial exercise and one that works 99% of the time accurately. Reading and sending texts is also a rock solid feature.

Again my main issue with the article was that these assertive features were not even discussed.

Non-English world, perhaps?

And even if you use English, any kind of non-US accent is pretty much doomed.

And even if your accent is 100% Silicon Valley denizen, any app that uses your input for searching will possibly have ambiguities or incorrectness on the results, and currently there are very few tools to correct misunderstanding, even if it doesn't mishear.

And that is assuming that search results are even deterministic, many apps either randomize (or "personalize" for business interests) or update their search logic regularly enough for it to be a problem for a casual user.

Calling a taxi to the wrong destination (for example) is very much not acceptable, ever.