Details below about her other health and ability limitations, that may sway suggestions. Sorry it’s a long post, it’s just really important to me that she regains some of her personal autonomy.

My aunt is in her late seventies and has always kept a pretty busy lifestyle with lots of friends and active in her community, despite having some minor mobility issues related to MS, which she’s been managing for many years.
She’s always been very deliberate about showcasing her funky personal style with her clothing, hairstyles, constantly redecorating her house, etc. Naturally, the sudden loss of sight was shocking and it affected her self confidence.

She became homebound due to feeling self conscious about her appearance and also because she was afraid of hurting herself, falling etc. She was resistant to learning how to live as a blind person at first because early on the doctors felt her sight may come back and she was pinning a lot of hope on that possibility. Unfortunately, she was also diagnosed with breast cancer around the time, and started chemo. It’s been a rough year.

Over the months she moved around less and less. She lost a lot of coordination, struggling to use her hands to hold a glass or feed herself. This could have been an indicator of what was to come but I believe also a result of her husband doing too much, not letting her learn to do everyday things without sight, and caused her to lose some hand-eye coordination, even bringing her hand to her mouth seemed to be a challenge. No one in my family lives closer than two hours from her so we didn’t understand the extent of this all at once or right away.

Being immobile for so long caused massive blood clotting in her legs, and another long and complicated hospital stay with some other issues that the doctors still don’t fully understand - several weeks of deep confusion and amnesia. It was intense and with doctors unable to determine what was happening we thought we may lose her.

They tried a range of treatments to address the mysterious symptoms she was presenting, and thankfully something worked. Once she was back to a coherent mental state, she agreed to an SSRI for depression, something I’ve been imploring her to do for months. Currently, the clots are almost gone, she’s in physical therapy and making tremendous progress. To see her now, weak as she still is, it’s like she’s finally back to her old self mentally and getting stronger physically. She’s not in major pain, has been feeding herself, holding a phone to her ear on her own, etc. and I want to seize the opportunity to keep her on the right track.

Her familiarity with technology is pretty typical for someone her age, not savvy, but she’s not daunted by it. Initially, when she first lost her sight, we were able to set up her Samsung phone with “ok google” commands and she could sort of answer and make calls, not perfectly and it was a short term setup, but I was impressed how quickly she was learning and troubleshooting. We felt an iPhone may be a better option for setting up voice commands, so we got her one, but there were issues with the phone and she got discouraged and ended up cancelling her plan, just relying on her husband and their landline.

She finally seems to have gotten her hope back, along with her mental clarity. The goal is to get her back home within the next couple months, and she’ll still have help from nurses/family/friends but I would love to be able to set up her phone so she could choose to listen to music or the news or make a call without asking for help.

Apologies for all the backstory, this has been pretty harrowing for my family and I guess I’m venting a little by writing it all down. I really appreciate any thoughts or advice that anything above brings up, whether it’s phone / tech related or not. Thank you.