One of my favorite long term client’s owns a Naim ND 555 as his primary source. As he has aged, he has run into diminished eye sight and now finds it difficult to control his streamer in the traditional ways on his Apple phone using the Naim APP, or even by using a larger Apple Tablet. I wonder if there might be some ways to control the streamer via voice commands, if not through the Naim APP, perhaps through Siri functions on the Apple device, or perhaps through Tidal Connect or Qobuz Connect. If anyone has any tips they can share with me based on your experience, I would love to be able to help my client be able to continue to enjoy his music. Thanks for your help.
Hi Bruce. It’s Jay. I too am visually impaired but I still can use my iPhone. I did a search and apparently you can run the app on an Apple Silicon Mac says AI.
Will that help? What about a screen magnifier? He might also contact Apple Tech Support. They are very committed to assistive tech. Lastly, there is a company called Freedom Scientific who is a leader in screen magnifying software.
In addition to the comments of others: I think Qobuz supports Siri since a couple of weeks. At least, that’s my understanding. As I am on Android I haven’t used it myself.
1 - the original post references “diminished eyesight”. That doesn’t really tell us much. Those of us who live permanently in this world can have problems with light, colour, movement, focus, visual field, some or all of the above, stable conditions, fluctuating conditions, degenerative conditions or more. Appreciate it could be a sensitive issue but it would genuinely help inform the advice if we knew what the specific issue was.
For many years I’ve just operated using larger print in browsers or pinch and zoom so it’s been something of a revelation to me to discover things like colour filters and certain shortcuts which make life slightly easier.
2 - whilst there are plenty of people trying to make a living in accessibility with specialist advice and devices/software you really aren’t going to get a device more accessible than something using iOS. There an awful lot of options there and if you can’t make them work then your options rapidly narrow. You don’t necessarily need Apple Tech Support for that. Your local Apple Store and a 1 to 1 session should suffice for many use cases.
If you can’t get the iOS device working for the customer using those options then it’s very unlikely that other solutions will help. I’ve seen the Atom work well with Google Assistant and Siri though so there are definitely many options to be explored.
Yes maybe zoom or the end solution if sightloss gets worse learning voiceover. This is for good reason a new set of gestures, but The naim apps in most respects play nice with voiceover/ios.
Thanks for your suggestions and comments. We will try to help the client in any way we can. I should have phrased my thread title better for which I apologize.
As for Naim and the Google Home/Assistant, here is a collection of threads I started about a variety of problems. Neither Google support nor Naim support could resolve them, so I threw in the towel and switched to Alexa and Wiim (for voice control purposes - I still have my Naim hardware, which I control with the app).
Note - the search also picked up a couple of threads that aren’t relevant, but most reflect months of frustration trying to get Google Home/Assistant to work reliably with my Naim hardware.
I tried telling Siri to play the album “Music From Big Pink” from Qobuz. It would only play a single song - The Weight. I had a similar experience with “Abbey Road” and “Highway 61 Revisited.” However when I asked it to play a playlist of mine, it added the entire list.
I too run the Naim app on M series Macs. As long as a mouse is not a dealbreaker, you can use an M-chip MacBook or Mac Mini with any screen you like. No touchscreens on Macs, for better or worse. Not sure if there are third party touchscreen solutions available.
If screens are not an option, these days, expecting voice control is not crazy. There must be something along those lines, maybe custom, but more attainable every day.
Maybe related to the issues that Qobuz had in the last couple of weeks? I don’t know. As far as I understand they should be in the past since yesterday. So maybe Siri works again properly now as well. But that’s guessing from my side.
Thanks for your interest and attempt to help me in my quest to explore options for the client. Due to the fact that I have not been able to visit the client, I am not in a position to put his eyesight problems into a medical vocabulary. We have proposed a new remote control system, which will certainly help the client and his caregivers with TV access. The open questions is whether this improvement in ease of use will be sufficient for him to be able to operate Tidal, which has been his preferred music streaming service, which is why I kept asking about voice activated solutions. The new remote is equipped with these functions, so we will be able to experiment in the client’s home. Whether this will work, and how reliably it will work, are hard to predict.