iPhone 3G S provides new accessibility features including VoiceOver, a screen reader that speaks what appears on the iPhone 3G S display, enabling visually impaired users to make calls, read email, browse web pages, play music and run applications. The new universal Zoom function magnifies the entire screen, and the White on Black feature...

Lighthouse International organized a recent expo, showing off gadgetry geared for people with low or no vision. The group says the same technologies that can help most of the population in small ways can help people with vision loss in huge ways. "For someone who has normal vision, simple tasks for them are very difficult to do by a person...

Four years ago, the American Foundation for the Blind (AFB) in Huntington, WV set out to improve hard-to-read digital displays, like computer screens. It hired Marshall University researchers to do the job. Now, they think they have developed LCD screen technology that will lead to easy-to-read appliances, gadgets, and complicated operating...

Olivia Norman's fingers fly across her laptop keyboard, dexterously tapping out instant messages to friends and entering search-engine queries without committing a single typo. A minute later, she's listening intently to the voice cues that help her read e-mail and send text messages on her smartphone. Norman is blind, so the cues help her...

What kind of phone would a blind person use? I'll give you a hint: It's not an iPhone 3G. No, such a phone would have to eschew any fancy touchscreen for something more tactile, certainly — something like the Make Sens phone, a concept gadget designed by Takumi Yoshida. Eschewing Braille bumps for a surface with distinct contouring, the...

A former teacher at a school for the blind and a professor from Tsukuba University of Technology have developed a cell phone that sends out vibrations representing Braille symbols to enable people with sight and hearing difficulties to communicate. Using vibrations much like a Morse code, professor Nobuyuki Sasaki has invented a type of...