Five months ago I wrote to Chris, saying that I believed an iPad Mini
would be the best way to get Art back online and that I would like to
facilitate a fund-raiser on Mudcat to make that happen. After some back
and forth Chris decided that he'd rather not ask the Mudcat community
for help if he didn't have to and Dan (olddude) had offered to provide
a refurbished laptop which he thought might be more familiar to Art
and therefore easier for him than having to learn a new system.

For the last three years I've been volunteering at a nursing home and
assisting a resident with his computer usage as his physical facility has
been declining. We quickly switched from his desktop PC to a MacBook
laptop which was a huge improvement for him.

For the last year he's been using an iPad very successfully. Like Art, he
is wheelchair bound and for some months has been allowed out of bed
only for a few hours each day because of a slow-to-heal pressure sore.
The iPad has been a lifesaver -- he's watched more than a hundred
Netflix movies streamed over wifi, the built-in Mail app and Safari
browser are easy for him to use, and there's even an (inexplicably free)
Dragon Dictation app which works beautifully.

I recommend the iPad Mini because it weighs half as much as the full
size iPad, would be much easier for Art to handle, and costs $329
compared to $499. It has voice recognition equivalent to Dragon
Dictation built-in -- there's a microphone icon on the keyboard which
can be used in any application where text is to be typed.

I recognize my view will be unpopular in this forum -- you all are
thinking about large touch-screen laptops and 2TB hard drives -- but
I think I'd be remiss not to give my opinion. I do believe I know what I'm
talking about, based on my experience assisting my resident. An iPad
Mini will do everything Art wants to do, and is small and light enough
to be held in one hand.