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I’m building this site to support a book project. It replaces an older site that you can see here.

Material from my Down Syndrome Association of Minnesota presentation of Sept 2017 is here.

About the author

John Faughnan is a father of two persons with atypical minds. He’s writing a book to share what he’s learned over the past five years of promoting independence and responsible smartphone use for persons with autism and cognitive disabilities who need external support.

In addition to his experience as a parent John is a family physician, a specialist in medical informatics, and decades of experience in software development.

You can contact John at jf@sphone4all.com

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iPhones for all: Book chapter on configuring Explorer notifications

From the chapter on “Simplifying the iPhone”: iPhone apps have many ways to get an Explorer’s attention. They can beep, flash[1], display red circles on icons, and show “banners”. Banners are text and images that can stay or fade, and they can appear over apps, on the notification screen, and on the lock screen. Yes, …

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Historic event: Google expands “accessibility” to include cognitive disability

I’ve never seen anything like this from Microsoft, Apple, or Google — until today … Action Blocks: one tap to make technology more accessible we’ve been experimenting with how the Assistant and Android can work together to reduce the complexity of these tasks for people with cognitive disabilities… … Googler Lorenzo Caggioni used the Assistant …

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Managing web access on iOS for Explorers (and for younger children)

My current thoughts on managing web access on an iPhone. I wish Apple gave us better options, I haven’t heard of any improvements coming with iOS 13. I don’t mention third party solutions — I tested those extensively years ago and decided they weren’t worth pursuing. That’s not a fault of the vendors, Apple needs …

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