[stylist] OT: FYI: braille device for smart phones

[Donna Hill]

Saw this on another list. The source wasn't given.
Donna

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.

You can watch a video of the app in action
 on YouTube:

iframe%3e%3c/span%3e

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:

block quote
"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."

block quote end

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."

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