TL;DR: Accessibility settings can be super powerful but so hard to learn that, without either an experienced trainer or a determined learner, they’re useless. D

TL;DR: Accessibility settings can be super powerful but so hard to learn that, without either an experienced trainer or a determined learner, they’re useless. Does anyone have recommendations for learners and amateur (family) trainers? To the OP: I’ve been in a similar situation with my mother. Unfortunately her loss of eyesight happened so suddenly that we weren’t able to follow the excellent advice to get her started on the technology adaptation before her eyesight (mostly) went. I’m hoping that our negative experiences here can be a warning to others. The primary lesson is this: Apple products, especially the iPhone, have the best accessibility features for vision-impaired users. Unfortunately, getting fluent with those features requires lots of time and training. If your mother isn’t able to reach that fluency, she may end up not using the devices for more than a couple of basic tasks. I recommend finding videos of experienced people with impaired vision using their iPhones, because it’s quite amazing: they can feel their way around the UI with tactile feedback, and read via text-to-speech that’s often running so fast that it sounds like brief bursts of noise if you aren’t used to it. We’re used to Apple devices being super-constrained in customizability, but the Accessibility settings provide far more flexibility than the rest of the UI settings. (This is a double-edged sword, which I’ll get to.) We were hoping to give my mother that ease of use with her phone, but first we had to move her to a new iPhone from an old Samsung. We (her family) were very time and energy constrained, so didn’t complete the first and most basic step: moving her fully from one phone to the other. This meant that she kept using the Samsung by default, and effectively got no experience with the iPhone. Even with the iPhone in hand, there’s a bigger problem: no obvious route to go from a standing start to a trained-up user. I found very few good guides to using the low-vision features, and even when I had them, I didn’t know how to start training my mother. The double-edged sword I mentioned earlier is that the Accessibility settings are copious and complex, and if you don’t know what you’re doing, it’s easy to accidentally switch the device into a usage mode that’s hard to understand and even harder to turn off. If your mother is sufficiently motivated and downright brave enough to experiment with the settings and learn them for herself, it _might_ be possible. But I can see a hundred reasons why that might not be the case. Modern technology is terrifying enough for seniors as it is. So I’d start by looking for in-person training help in her area.