When size matters

The new BT Freestyle digital cordless telephone and answerphone system is being directly pitched at older and disabled people. Ian Macrae finds out whether it rings his bell

If you want accessible and usable, there’s usually a trade-off to be made.

You can’t have style, cool, or, most of all, small and neat. But then you ask ordinary people what they want from, for instance, a mobile phone, and they’ll say something with reasonable-sized buttons and numbers, and a screen they can read which isn’t going to get lost too easily.

In the domestic telephone market, the arrival of digital telephone technology has meant there’s more demand for cordless telephone systems with multiple handsets in different rooms, bringing much more freedom and flexibility of use. But typically, manufacturers have slavishly followed trends in the mobile market. The phones they produced, if you’re clever and dexterous enough to use them, are so dinky that they might well have made the tea and put out the cat, if only you could find them.

Enter the Freestyle 750, out and proud about the size of its screen and its buttons. And while the handset is about twice the size of our existing cordless phone set chez Macrae, it somehow manages to be large without being clunky.

And its silver and grey finish and slimline looks mean that it has contemporary style and doesn’t stick out like a sore thumb.

While with space for only 50 numbers, the capacity of the phonebook isn’t massive, at least it’s possible for me to enter numbers into it independently and without the aid of my twelve times magnifying specs, thanks to the size and clarity of the font on the screen. The buttons on the handset’s keypad are large, well-spaced and distinctive to touch.

The answerphone which is built into the base unit has big buttons, too, which are easy to find either by sight or touch, they’re labelled in huge white type against a dark background, and the more significant ones give speech feedback: so the “play” button will tell you whether you have messages or not and how many there are. Another button tells you if you’ve just turned the answerphone on or off. The speech is clear in an English female voice. The only thing missing for me was speech feedback from the caller ID, which is displayed on the screen. The handsets are also hearing aid-capable, so this is one phone which ticks a good range of impairment boxes.