Les Jones: More Christmas Gift Ideas for the Vision-Impaired

December 02, 2007

Macular Degeneration > More Christmas Gift Ideas for the Vision-Impaired

Three Christmases ago I made a list of gifts for people with poor vision. The other day someone posted in comments asking for more ideas, so here are some thoughts on what we've found helpful.

Living Solutions oversized TV remote controls are extremely helpful. Walgreen's sells them around Christmas and Mother's Day. The remote itself is so big it's hard to lose, and the big buttons are easy to see.

My mom's vision is so far gone due to macular degeneration she can't even read the oversized numbers, but she likes hers for another reason. Mom locates buttons on the remote by memorizing their location - she starts in one corner of the remote and counts down and over so many buttons. Her TV's original remote (shown in the picture) has small buttons of differing sizes arranged in an artistic fashion that she found difficult to navigate. The buttons on the Living Solutions remote are large, consistent in size, and are laid out in a checkerboard grid of rows and columns that she finds easy to follow.

Here's an inexpensive and useful gift - stick-on, raised dots. Mom can't read the dials on appliances, so we mark them for her with raised dots. We've placed dots on the timer dial of her microwave for the five minute mark, and on her oven dials for the medium heat setting. The washing machine has dots for the water level, temperature, and duration settings she uses. Melissa puts one, two, or three dots on the caps of mom's prescription bottles so she'll know how many times to take the medicine each day. You can see an orange dot on the smaller remote control in the picture.

You can find stick-on dots in the hardware section of your department store. They're sold alongside the felt pads you put inside kitchen cabinet doors and the sliders that go under furniture legs.

Melissa has started buying mom books on tape (or actually CD) and mom's enjoyed those.

The talking watch from a few years ago was a big hit and is almost indispensable. The first one quit working so mom now has another one. If you know someone with poor vision a talking watch is a surefire hit.

Posted by lesjones | TrackBack

Comments

I really considered getting one of these for my great-grandmother. She can hardly make out faces on the television, even with the 60" TV that one of her kids got her to attempt to remedy that last year. The remote is small and picky, so she has trouble changing the channel.

The problem with the jumbo one is that it STILL has lots of buttons. Keep in mind, she lived a good chunk of her life in a time before electricity and indoor toilets.

She's not going to be playing DVDs, or switching inputs on the TV. She just wants to go from watching the preacher in the afternoon to watching the evening news at 5. If she ever managed to accidentally fire up the menu on the thing, she'd be completely lost.

I used to see "travel" universal remotes. They had five buttons in one column: Power, Volume Up, Volume Down, Channel Up, Channel Down. The buttons were big, too. Probably 2/3 the size of the buttons on that "jumbo" model.

Posted by: Paul Simer at December 02, 2007

I've thought the same thing.

Here's a really simple remote. We bought one, but mom didn't care for it because it doesn't have numbers. Clicking up and down buttons to change the channel from 8 to 55 isn't much fun when you can't see.

I sorta wish the bit remote she had didn't have DVD and VCR modes. Sometimes she gets into the wrong mode and it gets confusing.

Posted by: Les Jones at December 02, 2007

You could always take the thing apart and take the rubber out from between the "VCR/DVD" button. That would significantly reduce the chance of her accidentally switching modes on the remote. We used to actually do this when I worked in A/V at a school and we issued TVs to professors that weren't up on the technology.

Posted by: Paul Simer at December 03, 2007

Wa. state has a state Library for the Blind which provides "talking books" on cd's and tapes to eligible people via the mail and at no cost (no cost to ship them back either). The library supplies the cd and tape players also. The subscriber fills out an application, signed by their physician, they select categories of interest e.g. westerns, history etc. and the library periodically sends appropriate material. This is a very popular service here for blind and low vision folks. I believe it is partly funded by the library of congress so I would expect other states would have a similar service.

Posted by: orb at December 03, 2007

I take care of my 96 year old aunt's affairs since she is legally blind from the same disease. I didn't know about the stick-on dots but I do know about the other things and have bought here several including the talking watch and large button phone. I found a talking clock for here at Radio Shack. She can just push a button and it tells her the time. And the books on tape are a god send. She gets most of hers from the state of Tennessee (on loan via mail--like a library).

Posted by: at December 03, 2007