A good friend of mine is visually impaired. We have worked together and he has been successful using a Kenwood TS-590 on HF (it has a strange mix of voice, Morse code, and tone beeps, but you can deal with it), and a desktop VHF rig with channels programmed (he detects channel 1 by a different beep tone, then counts clicks).
I wanted him to have a HT to use. Sadly there are only a few with voice prompts. The ubiquitous BaoFeng UV-5R, is one, but it is VERY easy to accidentally stumble into a mode you can’t recover from if you can’t see. I had heard that the Wouxun KG-UV9D(Plus) was another capable HT, a bit better designed than the UV-5R, and boasting voice prompts.
Since this is a Type 90 Approved Radio, I figured it would be very simple to program some channels, and disable everything else (commercial users aren’t allowed to adjust things from a keypad). That task proved difficult as the radio has no obvious way to disable its very frustrating BAND function (half of the display is set to one band and the other half to another). One can disable the keypad, but you are still left with a VHF on one half and a UHF on the other (or dual VHF if you want), but you can only select channels on one of them (because the band button is disabled). That says anything left on the other “unused” half of the display might open the squelch.
I worked around this by programming channel 100 to be 147.985 MHz, setting the power to low, and the squelch to max 9.
The real reason this became an issue, is that the voice prompts only work for a few things, not all of them. It would be helpful to announce Band A (upper display) or Band B (lower display), or perhaps use a higher beep for A than B, but Wouxun didn’t think that through.
Please, please, please, for the love of everything sacred, radio vendors should spend more than 30 seconds thinking of how a visually impaired user would want to use your radios and realize that no amount of screen prompts will help someone get out of an unwanted situation if they can’t see. Use voice prompts for everything or at least chose your beep frequencies so someone can hear what is going on.
