It's hard to find an audiobook player that can be easily used by a non-tech-savvy, visually impaired elderly people (and I mean 85+, not 60 years old "seniors").

So I have built my own.

I'm terrible at hardware hacking and I wanted to make something that others can replicate easily. There are many awesome RaspberryPi based projects out there but they're not for me. So my approach was to: use off-the-shelf consumer products: a cheap tablet, a smart case etc. and write an app to push it as far as I can.

I have created Homer Audio Player with the following assumptions and functionality:

- it's meant for two users: a caregiver who manages content and a listener who controls only playback,

- lockdown/kiosk mode - notifications, system navigation and other apps are hidden from the user - this converts an Android device to a dedicated device,

- hidden settings section (optionally) - there's no chance for an accidental tap to "break" anything,

- mainly for audiobooks, but will play anything,

- simplified podcast support - the listener can choose only from a small number (1-5) of the most recent episodes,

- unique features for older users, e.g. you can add extra screen margins to have more area to hold the device by,

- balance between simplicity and functionality: you can enable/disable particular controls like volume, rewind etc.

In the end you get a robust audio device with simple user interface and some hidden smarts.

It has been battle‑tested by my grandmother for over ten years.

Technical stuff:

Kiosk mode is implemented with standard Android for enterprise functionality. The device needs to be factory reset and set up as a "company owned" device by installing a special companion app. The companion app is a device policy controller (DPC) that grants the Homer Audio Player app permissions to enable Android's "lock task". The player app can then pin itself to the screen. It's the regular "task pinning" but it can't be unpinned by user gestures, only by the app itself (which is exposed to the caregiver user in settings). It's relatively friendly to non-technical users. The device can be reverted back to its original state by doing a factory reset. Android Docs: https://source.android.com/docs/devices/admin#fully-managed

Touch screen as input device is not ideal for visually impaired users. It would be much better to have tactile buttons. But I had to work with this limitation by using:

- the accelerometer for "flip-to-stop" - placing the device with screen down stops playback,

- 8" tablet so that the buttons are large enough to see and hit even for low-vision users.

- I haven't enabled TalkBack for my grandmother's device as I'm afraid it might be a bit too techy and requires relatively good motor skills. However buttons are properly labelled for accessibility services.

Text-to-speech comes free on Android for so many languages. So far it's being used to read titles while swiping but I may use it a bit more in the future, e.g. to signal end of audiobook.

Regular Android is running underneath, so any apps can be installed to run in the background. I use "Autosync for Google Drive" to sync a folder and thus manage audiobooks on the device remotely by modifying content in a shared Google Drive folder. I know other users use SyncThing and similar solutions.

I wanted to make a device but I can only make apps, so I made an app that makes the most of a mass-market device. I'd love to hear your feedback or suggestions.

Videos: https://homeraudioplayer.app/videos Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.studio4plu... F-droid: coming soon! GitHub: https://github.com/msimonides/homerplayer2 BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/homeraudioplayer.app

John Varley (1947-2025)