Allows a visually (and somewhat mentally) impaired user to use a land-line phone, by using a fool-proof input device (game controller), audio feedback and a dial-up modem.

My grandma is getting more and more visually impaired and also developing a bit of dementia. We've tried a big-button telephone, we've tried a telephone with separate big-button dialers, we've added a cd-player with somebody talking on it ("to call Jan, press the first button, to call ... etc") but this became harder and harder for her.

When granny presses a button, a friendly voice tells her to listen to the names that are coming up, and press a button again if she hears the person she wants to call. Then all of her friends and family are listed. She mashes a button again, is asked to confirm, and an old dial-up modem is used to dial the number for her.

It needs a few fixed audio files for the main program, and a list of cleverly named audio files that contain the persons she can call. The files have the phone number to dial in their file name.

It uses the package pyserial to talk to the modem, and pygame for playing sounds and reading the game controller.

Record your own audio files, with a contact's name per file.

Name the contact list files something like <sequence_number><name_of_contact><phone_number_to_dial>.wav (for example 1_bill_5551234.wav) and put them in a directory of your choice.

The sequence number is used to sort the contacts, so you'll have this program list all the contacts in the order you want. The name is just for yourself.

In the number to dial you can use special characters that your modem will allow to enhance the dialing, such as "W" for waiting for a second dial tone or a "," (comma) for waiting for 2 seconds.

You'll need a modem (and need to know what its serial port is named) and a game controller. And speakers.

You'll need python 2.7. (I don't know if it works on python 3 as well.)

You'll also the python packages pyserial and pygame. Install pyserial with pip, eg with sudo pip install pyserial (Linux) or python -m pip install pyserial (Windows) . The package pygame does not come via pip. For Windows, you'll have to download and install pygame-1.9.2a0.win32-py2.7.msi (Windows) manually. For some flavours of Linux, you can type sudo apt-get install python-pygame.

To start the program in Windows, use for example: python main.py COM1: d:\contacts or in Linux: ./main.py /dev/ttyUSB0 ./contacts

For all other options enter: ./main.py --help

A raspberry pi, a cheap usb-to-serial converter ("USB 2.0 to Serial RS232 DB9 9-Pin Adapter Cable GPS" on ebay), an old external serial dial-up modem I got from my local craigslist, a simple usb wired gamepad, and some pc speakers.

Maybe you could use a usb dial-up modem, but be certain sure that your operating system has drivers for it.

I'm a Java programmer, but the combination Java, game controllers and raspberry pi gave me... well... nothing. Python on Raspbian had both the pyserial and pygame packages by default.

No it isn't! I think. It's my first python project. Spare me! Or better: tell me what could be better.