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

[Eve Sanchez]

Cool news. Thanks for sharing. Oh and I take it that blind stitchers is a
sewing group? Sounds fun. Guess what Im doing today. I have to do it all by
hand though as I dont have a decent sewing machine.  Smile. Eve

On Wed, Feb 22, 2012 at 10:10 AM, Donna Hill <penatwork at epix.net> wrote:

> 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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