hey bill:
well, you are certainly welcome on the list.
I'm from alberta canada and have been legally licensed for three years and a
few months.
There are a couple very accessible HT's on the market right now.
One was already mentioned by anthony, the kenwood TH F6A tri-band HT.
This covers 2 metres, 220MHZ and 70 CM respectively.
It has 5 watt output and has a general coverage receiver that goes from
something like 100KHZ up to 1GHZ...including single side band receive on the
HF frequencies.  Most of the members of this list have one of these radios
and can tell you more about them.
The other accesible HT is the Icom IC T90A.  It is also a tri-band HT, but
covers 6metres (FM only) 2 metres and 70CM.
It also has a general coverage receiver from 100KHZ up to 1GHZ, but no SSB
on this one.  The one striking feature about the IC T90 is that it has CW
readout of the frequency.
It is the only HT that has this.  There is one newer series of HT's coming
out of china, called the puxing which supposedly have some speech
capability, but they are single band HT's.
They are quite inexpensive though and might be a good jumping off point for
you to get on the air.
That said, the IC T90A and the TH F6A, while being a bit pricy, are very
accessible offering differing beep tones for the functions, keypad entry of
frequency and many of the radios functions as well.
Both are quite easy to operate as a totally blind person without sited
assistance.  The best way to get to know these rigs and successfully use
them is read the manual and follow it.  If you memorize the functions you
want to perform, you'll be set.
If you are interested in VHF/UHF packet and satelite work, I suggest perhaps
looking into getting yourself one of kenwoods mobile rigs.  There are
several to choose from, both no longer made and availible on the used market
quite cheaply, or one of the current production rigs.  All the newer kenwood
dual band radios are speech capable.
The reason i say this is because if you can set something up in your
apartment with a rotatable dual band beam antenna, you will be far more
successful working FM satelites then with an HT or smaller antenna set up.
You can get 3 element dual band antennas that are quite small and reasonably
priced just for this purpose...a small tripod in your living room and a good
sence of direction and you could work satelites quite easily I think.
As for Packet operation, that isn't my thing so perhaps john or one of the
other packet guys could fill you in on the best way to get into that mode.
Some of the current kenwood dual band mobile rigs that are very accessible
and that will accept the speech synthesisers are:
Kenwood TM V71 (this is the most accessible VHF UHF radio on the market
currently)
Kenwood Tm D700
Kenwood TM 708
some of the older radios that were also very accessible and are no longer
made but cheap on the used market are:
Kenwood TM V7A
Kenwood TM G707

All of these rigs listed above have both 2M and 70CM capabilities with
usually 50 and 25 watt output, or 50 and 50 watt output for the two bands.
The TM D700 and perhaps one of the other mobiles also have built in TNC's
for both packet, and GPRS use.

THat is probably more then enough info for now and i'm going to run out of
message space pretty quickly.
Feel free to ask any question you like on the list, you'll almost always get
a pretty quick and informative response.
73
Colin, V A6BKX