[visionrehabtherapist] FW: Braille Input on smart phones

From: Candy Lien <cmlien@xxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <SDT-VISN@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 21 Feb 2012 10:40:13 -0600
 
<http://whatsnext.blogs.cnn.com/2012/02/20/can-braille-be-faster-than-qwerty
-app-developer-thinks-so/> Can Braille be faster than QWERTY? App developer
thinks so


By John D. Sutter, CNN

(CNN) - If Mario Romero has his way, we'll all be learning Braille soon.

The post-doc researcher at Georgia Institute of Technology has co-developed
an app, called BrailleTouch, that could help blind people send text messages
and type e-mails on touch-screen smartphones without the need for expensive,
extra equipment. To use the app, people hold their phones with the screens
facing away from them and punch combinations of six touch-screen buttons to
form characters. The app speaks a letter aloud after it's been registered,
so there's no need to see the screen.

The system is designed for blind and visually impaired people, who otherwise
have to purchase thousand-dollar machines or cumbersome "hover-over" (more
on that later) keyboards to be able to type on no-button smartphones. But
Romero sees a spin-off for the technology: The touch-screen Braille keyboard
is so fast that sighted people may start using it, too.

"It may be a solution for everybody to get their eyes off their phone so
they can walk and text or watch TV and make a comment on a blog," he said by
phone. "It may free the sighted people's eyes" and help visually impaired
people to type more easily.

The free app, which is being developed for Apple iOS and Google Android
devices, should be available in a matter of weeks, he said.

So far, the app has only undergone limited tests, and Romero declined to
make a pre-release version available to CNN. In an 11-person trial, however,
he said, some Braille typists were able to go faster than they could on
standard, QWERTY keyboards. One visually impaired person, who was already
familiar with Braille (you punch the six keys in various combinations to
make letters) typed at a rate of 32 words per minute, Romero said, with 92%
accuracy. Romero himself, who never had used a Braille keyboard before, was
able to type at about 25 words per minute with 100% accuracy after a week of
practice, he said.

The app will undergo more rigorous testing before it's released, said
Romero, who is a post-doctoral researcher at the university's School of
Interactive Computing. It was developed with the help of  Brian Frey,
Gregory Abowd, James Clawson and Kate Rosier.

Smartphones are generally pretty good at reading material on their screens
to people who have vision problems, he said, but it's usually difficult to
enter text on the devices. To get a sense of what it's like for a blind
person to use an iPhone you can go to Settings >> General >> Accessibility,
and turn the "VoiceOver" feature on. When you touch a menu item, the iPhone
reads the text aloud in a computerized voice. To select something on the
screen, you double-tap that item. To scroll, you use three fingers.

All that works well, Romero said, but typing on an iPhone without buttons is
a pain. Another alternative, he said, is attaching a hardware Braille
keyboard to a smarpthone, but those are difficult to carry and are
expensive:

"The options (blind people) have right now are either too expensive and
cumbersome or too slow. Virtual keyboards and soft keyboards - like Apple's
voice-over keyboard - are too slow. Or they have options to get hardware
that costs several thousand dollars."

The new app may not alleviate all of those problems. On Android phones, the
BrailleTouch app can be programmed in as the phone's standard keyboard.
Because of restrictions on iOS, he said, that can't happen on an iPhone, so
people who want to use the BrailleTouch keyboard have to open the app, type
into a text document and then copy-paste that into an e-mail or text
message.

Romero admits that this app isn't the end-all-be-all in typing. But it's
helping create a future, as he said, when "one day we're not slaves to the
screens."
[visionrehabtherapist] FW: Braille Input on smart phones

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