Smartphone Help for People With ADHD, Dyslexia, or Autism

A few weeks ago I was doing some research for a potential smartphone App project at Appware. Without going into details, the objective of the project was to help people who were either dyslexic, or had AHDH or autism. Lots of people with these conditions aren’t able to use smartphones effectively or comfortably. They often struggle with glare, discomfort, or blurry words while using them. Help is at hand though as I discovered quite a lot of useful information which I thought was worth sharing here :)

Most people these days use a smartphone that is either Android (typically Samsung, Motorola etc) or an iPhone. I’ve split this article into sections for each set of users below as the steps to help are different.

So if you use an iPhone read on (otherwise skip to the next section)

iPhone Users
The great news is that if you use an iPhone (or indeed an iPad), it has help for you built into it. This is in the form of a colour screen filter which should make your reading more comfortable and accurate.

To set this up, go to “Settings > General > Accessibility > Display Accommodations” and then select Colour Filters. When you switch this on it shows 4 preset colour schemes as well as a “Colour Tint” option. You may want to try one of the presets or create your own prefered colour filter using the “intensity” and “hue” sliders. Once set then everything you do on your phone, regardless of what App you are in, will have this colour filter applied :)

Android users
If you’re an Android user (either phone or tablet) then there are some options that may help how readable your phone is. If you go to “Settings > Accessibility” and to the “display” section there are various things you can change. These include colour correction and colour inversion which some people find useful. Unfortunately, there are only a few presets so you don’t have full control of a colour filter applied to everything. You can, however, download an App to do this.

Hopefully this helps, and do feel free to let me know how you’ve got on with these. Or of course if you have any recommendations yourself, please let me know.

Thanks

Richard