My wife and I recently went to web phones through her discounted Verizon 
wireless services at the hospital where she works.  She got her phone, the 
HTC Ozone, for 29 dollars and the second one, mine, was free.  We had to get 
full internet access, $30 per month per phone, which includes insurance and 
all, if we bought the smart phones.  This, at the moment, seems to be the 
only current model of phone that Verizon has which works with the Mobile 
Speak screen reader.  We both use Mobile Speak for our screen reader at $275 
per phone.  Sandy started out using the software screen reader called TALKS 
for $90 but it crashed and hung up and screwed up so many times, we soon 
went to Mobile Speak instead.  I have been having a ball using it on the 
web, keeping track of appointments through a very sophisticated calendar 
appointment book, sending and receiving text messages and emailing directly 
with the phone.  Another cool feature of the phone is the ability to record 
a digital message, attach it to a person's email address, and they can hear 
you talking your email instead of having to type it on the qwerty keyboard. 
The keyboard is good for me because they are raised buttons but hunt and 
peck typing is slow and it happens to be the only way you can enter 
messages.  So a message this long, for example, would probably push you 
right off the deep end and I don't have that much more hair to pull out. 
You can also use voice recognition by programming it, or mapping commands, 
to various keys using your own voice.  For example, once you map the date 
and time key commands using your voice, you simply press a key and say, 
"What is the time?" and it reads it off to you.  You could program "Phil 
Scovell" into the voice system and it would dial my number for you.  so it 
is quite amazingly versatile.  Mobile Speak, the screen reader, works on 
dozens and dozens of phones, however, so there's no problem there.  I've had 
very few problems with the software locking up and when it has happened, 
I've been doing something I shouldn't have been fiddling with; like shutting 
the entire speech system down by accidentally trying out what I thought was 
a feature to make the phone vibrate.  Instead, it was a profile which turned 
the phone into a phone for sighted people.  Dad gum if them there sighted 
folks don't get mixed up with everything a blind feller tries to do, haha. 
Anyhow, I know this is off topic but I figure it is worth mentioning on this 
type of a list.

Phil.
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