Accessibility in Doro Liberto 820 mini, a smartphone specially designed for older adults

Wednesday, 1 July, 2015

By Amóvil

El Doro Liberto 820 mini

The Doro Liberto 820 mini is a Smartphone designed for senior citizens that is very easy to use and suitable for people with low vision, hearing disability, limited dexterity and poor comprehension skills. Amóvil was able to review this device thanks to a loan by Orange.

General features and specifications

Powered by Android 4.4 KitKat, this smartphone runs on a double core 1.2 GHz MediaTek MT 6572 processor. It also ships with 4 GB internal storage capacity and 512 MB of RAM.

This device is lightweight (132 grams) and sports a very ergonomic design with dimensions of 126 x 66 x 11 mm. It includes a 4 inches TFT display with 400 x 800 pixels resolution that contains three physical buttons at the bottom. The handset is also equipped with two cameras: one on the back of the phone with 5 mgx and VGA on the front for videocalls.

Another important feature is the assistance button located on the backside. Before it can be used, it must be enabled in the Settings menu and the emergency contact phone numbers must be added. When using it, the phone will dial the first contact on the list. If there is no reply within 25 seconds, it will dial the next number, and so on. Additionally, it will send an SMS to each contact informing of the emergency and of the location of the user.

Accessibility review

Accessibility menu

The Doro Liberto 820 mini comes with a simplified user interface that includes big icons and a limited Google apps selection that users can modify by tapping on the Google Apps file in the Home.

A peculiarity in this phone is that the Settings menu has two separated user interfaces. The main one is provided by Doro and includes a short list of basic settings options such as the wifi settings, Bluetooth, flight mode, date and time, among others.

The second one is Android’s original settings menu where the Accessibility menu is located. To gain access to this menu, users must tap on the icon that appears on the top right and scroll down until Accessibility shows up.

This process, however, can be problematic for some users. People with comprehension issues or that are not familiar with Android operating system, for instance, may have a hard time figuring out how to access accessibility options.

Vision

The Doro Liberto 820 mini comes with TalkBack preinstalled, the screen reader for Android. Although it reads aloud most of the available visual content, it cannot be considered suitable for blind people.

These users will face difficulties using the virtual keyboard because TalkBack reads the keys aloud only when they are tapped a second time. Additionally, there are several items that are either mislabeled or unlabeled which affect the performance of the screen reader.

Persons with low vision will be able to activate a screen zoom, as well as to change the size of the text and customize the screen brightness to meet their needs.

However, because this device lacks a high contrast color scheme and a feature to reverse foreground and background colors, it may not be suitable for people who are color blind or that have a high sensitivity to light.

Hearing

The Doro Liberto 820 mini is hearing aid compatible (HAC rating: T4/M4). Besides supporting SMS and MMS users can download instant messaging apps for Android such as WhatsApp or Google Hangouts. It also supports videocalls.

Dexterity

This smartphone is adequate for persons with poor dexterity skills. Its size and weight improve gripping ability as well as the interaction with the display. It also comes with a charging dock. Another feature benefiting these users is that contacts can be pinned to the home screen. A large picture of the contacts selected will appear on the display.

However, people with little or no dexterity skills will have a hard time using this smartphone because it does not include an accessible voice recognition feature. Although the handset ships with Google Now preinstalled it does not respond to voice commands to launch system features or menu options.

Additionally, while the Doro does not provide a software that would replace hardware buttons with software equivalents, it is possible to control some features using assistive devices such as styluses, mouth sticks or head wands.

Comprehension

The Doro Liberto 820 mini is adequate for people with comprehension issues or learning disabilities. Besides having a simple screen layout that is easy to use, it comes with the app My Doro Manager preinstalled that provides easy to understand tutorials showing how to use the phone.

Also, when an app is opened for the first time, a brief description of its use pops up along with step by step instructions.

For more information on the Doro Liberto 820 mini’s accessibility features, please consult the full accessibility report.

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Average: 3.6 (5 votes)

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