My brother in law (55 years of age) is physically and to a degree mentally handicapped.
He has cerebral palsy and lacks fine motor skills. Using a keyboard or a mouse is completely out of the question. In addition, he suffers from nystagmus, a condition that affects vision causing his eyes to move involuntarily. Although he can read with virtually 100% retention, because of the problem with his vision reading is slow and difficult for him.
Mentally, his handicaps are more difficult to quantify. On standardized tests his math scores are effectively zero, whereas verbal (in particular vocabulary) his percentile scores are in the high 90's. He has
Asperger's Syndrome and you can ask him a question and sometimes it seems like he is ignoring you, until a week later he answers it as though you had just that moment asked. He has a great deal of difficulty assimilating anything new in his environment, but once assimilated his memory is nearly eidetic.
He has held the same job for almost 40 years and is considered to be a valued employee there. As far as I know, he has never so much as physically touched a computer.
What options do I have for getting him a computer? I'm
not talking AutoCad here, or teaching him to set up a dual-boot system with Windows and manually configured Linux partitions. If I could provide him with nothing more than very simple [emphasis:
very simple] e-mail I would be satisfied. I cannot stress enough that it must be
foolproof and
non-complex. To put this into context, he went without television for several months after he pressed the "wrong" button on his remote, possibly changing the TV input from cable to antenna, and utterly unable to understand how to change it back. He has since mastered his TV remote, but it took explanation and multiple repetitions. He will
never forget how the remote works now, but should he get a new TV with a different remote, he would be right back to where he was before.
To be workable for him a computer would have to display very large fonts (half inch high letters at the minimum), have a touch screen with just a few large intuitive icons, and not require him to go four sub-menus deep to read an e-mail. I envision something like a tablet sitting on his table,
always in e-mail, that would
boot up into e-mail, where he would touch an icon to read an e-mail, touch another icon which would bring up a touch-screen keyboard with half-inch-tall letters to answer the e-mail, a third icon which would send the reply and return him to the original e-mail display, and perhaps eventually a fourth icon to initiate an e-mail, although that brings up complexities (e-mail address, etc.) that might prove too difficult. Some method of deleting e-mails would be desirable, and perhaps a way by which I could log remotely into his computer to do cleanup and fix problems would be good.
If computers and cell phones are related (I guess they are these days, aren't they!) I am looking for the computer equivalent of
this. Epiphany! I
will get him one of those!
Is there something out there that might prove suitable?
tanstaafl.
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