Program a button to tell time

[Loli Pits]

hi... first of all i would like to clearly state that i have zero experience in programming... but i do have some experience in soldering...

my mother has gone blind for about a year now and i would like to make her a device that would tell her the time and date...
i did try to look for a commercial product that would do that and i did... but its on amazon... i live in the philippines and i cant find it locally... 
Amazon.com: Talking Large Button Alarm Clock - Telling Time and Date for Elderly, Impaired Sight or Blind: Home & Kitchen

 

so i am now basically stuck with 2 options... pay a ton for shipping and 3rd party us address giving sites thingy... or build one myself

questions are...
would it be hard to source parts?
what would i need?
will it cost more than just to ship the commercial one from the us? 
do i need an in depth programming knowledge to code a program like that?

could someone maybe recommend a tutorial?
where should i start first?

sorry if my english is bad... england is not my city

[Unimportant]

A common approach would be to have some kind of ROM/EEPROM with wave audio samples for all the spoken words you need, a DAC and amplifier to convert the digital wave samples to audio that can be output on a speaker, and some sort of microcontroller that keeps the time and orchestrates sending the correct audio samples to the DAC to stitch then together into a sentence.

 

Not really achieveable without coding expierence.

 

Perhaps you could look into if something similar does not already exist on linux that could be ran on a raspberri pi or similar device.

[infamoustrey]

Also if you could get your hands on a cheap android device, there's almost certainly an app out there that could call out the date/time for her. I'm not sure if pushing a button is a requirement but the google voice assistant should be able to rattle the time off in most languages.

[mariushm]

Yeah, you'd have to record each word (zero, one,two...nine, ten ...twenty, first, second = for 21st of june,   hour, minutes, seconds, months of the year, thousands) ... depends how complex you want it, and then store them in eeprom or some memory chip and play them as needed using a dac and some amplifier/speaker.  (another option would be voice synthetiser chips, but they're expensive ... for example https://www.sparkfun.com/products/9578 )

Can be done with an arduino, but you can't get around programming such thing.

 

Without programming,  the easiest would be to just buy a big wall clock and remove the glass ... she can touch the clock hands with her fingers and tell the time.

 

Another option (but expensive) would be to make something tactile... think 8 segments for a digit, like on calculators, and lift up only the segments  you want to be felt.

Then use one (or several) solenoids or something to lift them up.... think ball point pens where one click reveals the tip... so a single solenoid could be used to on/off all 7 segments with some clever physics (like for example have the solenoid on a round disc, spin the disc to position the solenoid under the segment you want pushed, engage to activate segment, repeat until all segments you want are enabled)