I just a bought an iPhone 4s for my father-in-law who recently became vision impaired. Siri was great at making calls for him. All he needs to do Is say “call” and a name in his contacts. She also does great with the weather. There seems to be a learning curve for everything else but hopefully we’ll learn more as time goes on.

There’s just one thing missing. I say “Sirii can you answer the phone? When a phone call comes in, can you ask us to answer it or send it to voice mail?” She doesn’t understand, she can’t help us with that. There seems to be no way to answer the phone without the use of vision. When a all comes in the are two buttons on the screen one to recive the call the other to sen dto voicemail. I told him that he should just touch the screen anywhere, at least he had a 50% chance. He had an easier time with his flip phone because he could just open it when a call came in. After searching through the user guide and googling it a dozen times, I called apple support. They were nice, but kind of stumped. The guy put me on hold for six minutes to speak to his manager. He even said that He thought something was missing. The best solution they could come up with was to program in a custom gesture he could use to answer the phone.

We’ll see how that goes…

Update
When you turn on Voice over, you can answer calls with a two finger double tap.