Learn how to use Voiceover yourself then teach your sister how to use it. Configure the home key so that triple click brings up a menu to enable/disable accessibility features including colour inversion and Voiceover. This will let you easily switch between the two modes.

Voiceover is a lot easier to learn when you are fully sighted as you still have visual feedback to help you interpret the audio feedback. You can then sit with your sister and guide her when she gets lost or just needs encouragement.

My top hint for using Voiceover is to be patient with it. After it tells you what you have touched it will sometimes give you options for what you can do next. It can be tempting to touch the screen again as soon as you know what you've touched but you need to get used to Voiceover been slower than the normal UI.

This has been my experience.

What sort of things? I have large font, increased contrast, a larger home display and greyscale turned on my IPhone.

Apple's edge on this kind of thing is that they are pretty good at accessibility.

And, which is also important, they are *consistent.*

The accessibility features are well thought through, and they have behaved pretty much the same say, with only minor changes, since they were introduced. In other words, once she figures it out, she can confidently switch over to any new iPhone later when the time is right for that.

That's the main reasons why may users with vision impairment won't even consider having something else. She'll be in good company with her iPhone.

The first thing you might need to consider is getting her one of the largest available phones. iPhone 6 plus or any of it's Plus-branded siblings. They are the ones with the larger screen. It's what we buy to our near-pensioners at my job when they can no longer use a phone without also fetching their reading glasses, because you literally make the phone behave as if it was one of the really small screen'ed iPhones, but with a huge screen.

If her vision is so poor that it won't help her any to have a larger screen to look at, disregard what I just said. It's merely a food for thought-thing.

As long as she can sort of see, it's worth fiddling with the accessibility menus and try different settings for how buttons are represented, text size, zoom and so on. But...if she can't see what happens, the only sensible route forward is to help her learn to use the screenreader, VoiceOver, blindly. Yep. That annoying thing that forces you to click everything several times while it speaks the screen contents. That's what she'll have to rely on when she can no longer actually see the screen.

Along with making sure that all the important apps are always at the same location on the screen, setting up favourites in the Phone app and so on, that's how you make it practical to use it.

There is a learning curve for Siri, the voice assistant, but once it has learned to understand her it's also a pretty awesome compliment to VoiceOver. It's often more practical to tell your phone to *"phone mum"* than to actually click on the screen several times until it does it. Siri starts with a blank knowledge about you and your family. There will be a lot of *"call dad."* - *"Who is your dad?"*-conversations with Siri before it's useful. But it *is* useful once it has made all the relevant notes in your phonebook. Make absolutely sure that you use the iCloud backup so that what she teaches this phone in terms of who is who will follow to the next phone in the future.

Siri is one of those times when us lazy people who want to have our phone do mysterious things for us while we are driving has turned out to be a pretty good accessibility feature too. She just starts pretty dumb, Siri, and needs to be taught a lot of things.

Siri can be a bit headset dependant, training her with a bluetooth headset that has a lot of audio enhancement features may mean she'll have to be properly trained again if you switch to Apples own headsets. I have a lot of trouble with Siri when I switch back and forth between my Plantronics headset and the car. And definitely also when switching from the AirPods to the car, but less so when switching from the Plantronics headset to the AirPods. In other words, don't switch headsets unnecessarily. But definitely have a headset so that she can use the phone out among people without having others constantly being able to listen in on what she is doing. Apples cabled headsets (the ones that are shipped with the phone) are awesome for this. They really are.

iPhone can also make use of Bluetooth keyboards, which means that if she has trouble figuring out the typing thing on the screen, it's possible to buy a really small bluetooth keyboard and hook it up, so that she has something in her pocket that has proper keys. They are easier to learn to type on. And a lot faster too, if the phone will be her only communications-gadget.

It can also help a bit with the small screen to use a smartphone pen, though that means that there is even more stuff she has to carry with her to confidently use her phone. Let's not exaggerate unless she needs it.

And, oh. It's probably a good idea to lock the phone in either Landscape or Portrait mode, so that things are definitely not moving around on the screen just because she tilts it once she has learned where to click after them.

You might find this helpful
https://www.rnib.org.uk/information-everyday-living-using-technology/beginners-guides