Comment by vubuntu

iPad or other tablet with facetime or skype. Open a chat session, ask parents to point camera at laptop screen. Then guide them thru steps (click on this, click on that etc). Bit more time (and patience) intensive but has the side effect of making parents/relatives more familiar with doing new things on the computer as well as satisfaction of some level of self sufficiency :) . Only useful for this type of remote support use cases only though.