Hello Redditors,

My grandmother, aged 84, suffers from macular degeneration and her vision is declining. She is an avid reader, enjoys crossword puzzles and, most of all, letter writing to her friends and family around the world. About 5 years ago, her sight deteriorated to the point where she was finding using her typewriter difficult and was unable to read books and newspapers any more.

We brought her to the digital age with a second-hand Windows XP laptop, set her up with email, and Facebook and configured the machine with extra large fonts, high contrast display and on-screen magnifiers. Those helped enormously and she was able to keep up with the world around her and the goings on of her family and friends.

However, even this is becoming too difficult to see as her sight deteriorates further.

We were taken with the idea of a service similar to whatsapp voice notes that could be used for us to be able to send her recorded messages. However, something like whatsapp is phone based and that is much too small to be practical for her.

I am aware that there are a wealth of tools and accessibility options for computers, but I am also aware that many of these options are simply to overwhelming for her. Even something as simple as emailing attachments is out of the question - and that's before we've discussed recording a voice note, saving it as MP3, or similar.

Similarly, we would like to keep the barrier for incoming communication as low as possible so that she can easily remain in contact with her friends and family: most are definitely not tech-savvy.

What solutions that might help us? Would a tool such as Dragon Dictate be simple enough for her to master to at least dictate her replies? What options are available for controlling the PC?

I welcome any of your suggestions.