When thinking of SMS messaging, you probably don’t think of its usefulness for the blind. But that kind of thinking is exactly what visually impaired Barry Dickinson proved wrong when seeking ways to contacting friends and family on the go. Pairing TextMagic’s email SMS technology with talking screen reading software, he was able to use SMS messaging to get in touch.

Barry turned to TextMagic to keep in touch with his children originally, but later discovered that the service worked for him to contact friends and other family members who wouldn’t check their email as frequently as text messages.

Textmagic offers an Email to SMS service which lets anyone send and receive text messages from their email account. This may be useful for a mobile marketer, who is seeking to contact a few special users via SMS messaging without the hassle of sending SMS messages from a mobile phone. It likely wouldn’t be ideal if you wanted to contact hundreds of users via SMS.

The company charges approx $.1 to $.15 per SMS message sent from email through their program depending on which program you choose. They also offer products such as TextMagic Messenger, which lets the SMS sender use a desktop program to send text messages and receive replies, or TextMagic Online, where you can send SMS messages from any internet-connected device.