[Nyabs] For Texting Without Looking, Researchers Adapt Braille

[Kathryn Carroll]

Always cooler and cooler apps out there. Enjoy the article below.
Kate




http://mashable.com/2012/02/21/braille-touchscreen/

For Texting Without Looking, Researchers Adapt Braille

by Sarah Kessler


Touchscreens on everything from coffee makers to treadmills are intended to
provide better user experiences, but they can create a navigational
nightmare for the visually impaired.

A new technology developed at Georgia Tech, however, makes touchscreens
more accessible to the estimated22 million American adults with vision loss
by adapting the same system used to type Braille.

“Mobile keyboards have too many buttons that are too small, and it turns
the sighted into the blind and makes it so the blind can’t even use the
device,” says Mario Romero, a Postdoctoral Fellow who led the project.

Once installed as an app, the technology pulls up a six-key braille-based
keyboard rather than the standard QWERTY 26-letter keyboard.

Many visually impaired already use smartphone touchscreens without a
problem. The iPhone’s gesture-basedVoiceOver mode, for instance, reads
aloud whatever text someone touches on thescreen. Android has a similar
feature. Typing, however, is a more difficult matter. Romero says he
realized the extent of the problem when he heard about an typing
application for visually impaired mobile phone users that on average spit
out a measly two words per minute.

“[It would take you] one minute to write your first name and another one
minute to write your last name,” he says.

In order to speed things up, Romero’s mobile keyboard for the visually
impaired borrows the six-key system of the most common typewriter for
Braille, the 60-year-old Perkins
Brailler<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perkins_Brailler>.
The idea is that people who already know how to type Braille on a
typewriter won’t need to learn a new system in order to type on their
phones.

At least among 11 test subjects, the theory has panned out.

The best performer in the group, a 57-year-old visually impaired man who
learned Braille as a child, was able to type 32 words per minute with 92%
accuracy after just 20 minutes of practice.

The app, BrailleTouch, won’t be coming to the iPhone because its operating
system doesn’t allow developers to mess with the keyboard function. The
team has, however, planned a free Android version of the app.

Georgia Tech’s public relations team is promoting the project as something
that texters might use “while walking, watching TV or socializing without
taking their eyes off what they’re doing,” but Romero, who is careful to
point out BrailleTouch is not intended for texting while driving, seems
less sure that the technology will ever replace the mobile keyboard for
mainstream users.

“Braille was not optimized for texting,” he says. “It was optimized for
reading with your fingertips.”


------------------------------------------------
agolden at pobox.com

Avi Golden

137-29 70th Road
Flushing, NY 11367




-- 
Kathryn Carroll
St. John's University School of Law 2013
(Ph.) 347-455-1521
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