HP DeskJet 2842e All-in-One Printer
6W7E7A: Some questions on this from a blindness perspective? first, does it have any touch screen Iām going to have to deal with? Both AI and the HP Accessibility Line told me ānoā, but Iām just wanting to confirm this and other info I have already received as being accurate by our community. Second, is it accessible to set up? Third, if not, are they helpful in helping you set it up via their HP Accessibility Line? Fourth, is the app that goes with it accessible? I was also told by both AI and their accessibility team that it was but, again, confirming with actual blind people. Thanks.
Asking this as I would like to be able to print from my iPhone, just to make it relevant to the community.
Comments
To question 4
I don't have that specific printer, rather the 250. The HPSmart app is accessible. You will probably be happier using it if you make an HP account through the app to get full functionality of your printer. That process is accessible too, and very easy.
* I thought of one other thing. In a lot of situations, there will be an option to print through the HPSmart app. However, Pages doesn't want to do that on my phone, and uses Air print or something like that in the Pages "More" menu, if I remember correctly. Either way, you usually don't need to open the HP app to print.
Go laser
I generally do not recommend going inkjet, and especially from HP, who have a reputation of time-trapping perfectly fine ink cartridges to force you to buy more or subscribe to their provision services. While they might be significantly more expensive to buy, laser printers have a much lower maintenance cost especially for people who don't use them often.
My first laser printer had no scanner or fax or Wi-Fi or even network, it was just a totally dumb dedicated USB HP printer that last me over a decade before the toner that came with it had to be replaced, at which point I had already given it away. My second laser printer was a multifunction laser printer also from HP whose toner also lasted a decade, however in 2022 I ended up giving it away because, while its firmware was AirPrint compatible, the scanner still required drivers, and HP stopped producing them so I gave it away to the cleaning lady working for me at the time since she had Windows computers where the scanner was still supported.
My current printer is a Brother DCP L2550DN, which does have a screen and some buttons but you don't really need to use any of that to operate it, although memorizing the two buttons you have to press in a sequence to take advantage of its photocopier function can be helpful. This printer doesn't have Wi-Fi because I would probably not be able to configure that independently anyway, or Fax because we're already in 2025 so nobody should be using that crap anymore, but it's still a perfectly standards-compliant network printer that you don't even have to remember to turn on and off since it does that automatically. The only thing you have to do to use this printer is plug it to power, to your network router, and that's only it. It has mDNS / Bonjour support so everything on your network finds it automatically, and it supports all the protocols required to use it from any mainstream platform so no drivers are needed. Its firmware also provides a web service that you can access from any browser to adjust its configuration, after logging in using the credentials printed to a sticker in its back that Seeing AI has no trouble reading. Its scanner can be used in both flatbed mode, where you place individual sheets of paper one by one on its glass, or document feeder mode, where you just put a bunch of paper documents on some kind of tray and it automatically pulls and scans them one by one. As for the printer function, it is grayscale laser, supports automatic double-sided printing with all the standard photocopier modes you can expect like magnification and rotation, can be adjusted to many kinds of documents from envelopes to A4 paper sheets, has a fully protected paper tray that might be able to take up to 500 sheets at once although I usually keep far less inside, and unjamming paper from the scanner's document feeder or the printer is pretty easy.. As a nearly perfect cube with 40cm of edge, it's a bit on the bulky side, which may or may not be a problem to you, but other than that and the fact that I can't really use its physical buttons or screen for much, I don't really have anything to complain about. In three years of casual use, the maintenance requirements have been pretty non-existent, it just rests idle waiting for me to request its services, and if I stop using it for more than like 30 seconds, it just turns itself of.
@ JoĆ£o Santos
Hey, JoĆ£o!
I donāt want to go off-topic here, Iām sorry about that. But since you mentioned laser printers, and that the maintenance necessary is almost zero, I got really curious because Iām planning to buy a new printer.
How accessible is yours? You mentioned that it has a screenādo you need to use that at all?
In your opinion, what are the advantages of a laser printer for us blind people?
Iām from Portugal as well, but Iām not living in the country at the moment. But I travel to Portugal quite often.
Were you able to see your printer before buying it, like at a regular store?
Iām sorry for this commentāI know it is kinda off-topic.
Thank you so much in advance.