Ruben Morales, a blind 59-year-old retired engineer who lives in Morgan Hill, has used a specialized screen-reading program for years to write and run spreadsheets on his desktop computer. But just this month, he figuratively cut the cord to his desktop and joined the mobile revolution. Morales was visiting the Veterans Affairs Department's Western Blind Rehabilitation Center in Menlo Park learning how to use an iPhone's features for vision-impaired people. "It's pretty amazing." Morales said, demonstrating how he can call up a song and play it with a few taps. "Whatever I can do on the computer I can basically do it on the iPhone. It has the same capability." The smartphone, a gadget designed for the sighted, has turned out to be a godsend for the blind and visually impaired, making them more independent than ever before. With VoiceOver, the iPhone's built-in gesture-based app that reads text on a touch-screen aloud, or Google Android's TalkBack, blind users can access anything on their phones. The user activates apps with a few gestures -- single finger to explore and find buttons, one-finger touch to identify things on the screen, and double-tap to push the button after it's located.