Recommended products
Things I use, or have used, and would tell a friend about. Blog posts scroll away; this page is kept current.
Last updated . Every entry shows when it was last checked.
Nothing here is an affiliate link and none of it pays me anything. Where I have any interest in something, such as my own project or a free sample, the entry says so.
Recommendations by category
Built into your phone
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- Helps with
- Magnification and colour inversion, reachable instantly from a small floating button you can drag anywhere on the screen.
- Why I recommend it
- Easy to miss, and genuinely useful once you know it exists. The floating buttons are small and semi-transparent, so they can sit permanently over whatever you are doing without getting in the way. Magnification means you stop pinch-zooming things that refuse to zoom. Colour inversion is the unexpectedly good one: it will give you a usable dark mode on a site or an app that never bothered to offer one, which is the difference between reading something at night and giving up on it. Both are already on your phone and cost nothing to try.
- Available on
- Android
- Notes
- Settings › Accessibility. Turn on the shortcut for each tool you want, then drag the button somewhere it does not cover anything important. Wording and menu depth vary a little by manufacturer.
Last checked
Lighting
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- Helps with
- A pocket torch small enough that you actually carry it, for the times low light turns an ordinary task into a difficult one.
- Why I recommend it
- Very small for 1300 lumens, and light enough to live in a pocket permanently rather than in a drawer. That matters more than peak output: the torch that helps is the one you have on you when the corridor light is out or the label is too dark to read. If you want one that stays with you rather than one that does everything, this is the one.
Last checked
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- Helps with
- Putting light exactly where you need it, at exactly the brightness that helps. Bright enough for outdoors, dialled right down for close work indoors.
- Why I recommend it
- The stepless brightness control is the point. Most torches jump between fixed modes, and for low vision the useful setting is usually between two of them: enough light to make out detail, not so much that glare wipes out what you were trying to see. This one ramps smoothly, so you can stop wherever it actually helps. It is bright enough to be useful outdoors at 4600 lumens, and it still fits in a pocket.
- Notes
- Olight discount heavily and often, so the price moves a lot. Worth waiting for a sale rather than treating the list price as the price.
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Orientation and labelling
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AudioTag
Free- Helps with
- Attaching spoken audio labels to physical objects using NFC tags, so items can be identified without sight.
- Why I recommend it
- Mine. Free, open source, no account required, and it works entirely offline on the phone.
- Declared interest
- I wrote it.
- Available on
- Android
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Visual assistance
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Be My Eyes
Free- Helps with
- Connecting blind and low-vision users to sighted volunteers or an AI describer through the phone camera.
- Why I recommend it
- Free, well established, and useful for one-off tasks where a description is faster than any dedicated device.
- Available on
- iOS, Android
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