Developing "Eyes-Free" Gadgets and Applications 85
The New York Times is running a story about Google engineer T. V. Raman, who lost his vision at age 14 but didn't let that stand in the way of his interest in technology. In addition to modifying a version of Google's search engine to give preference to pages that were more compliant with accessibility guidelines, Raman is now working on making cell phones easier to use without needing to look at them. "Since he cannot precisely hit a button on a touch screen, Mr. Raman created a dialer that works based on relative positions. It interprets any place where he first touches the screen as a 5, the center of a regular telephone dial pad. To dial any other number, he simply slides his finger in its direction — up and to the left for 1, down and to the right for 9, and so on. If he makes a mistake, he can erase a digit simply by shaking the phone, which can detect motion." Raman and a co-worker, Charles Chen, are also attempting to extend various phones' ability to read back scanned text to include signs that are anywhere in the phone's field of view.
A good time to remember Braille is 200 years old (Score:1, Informative)
See
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7807217.stm [bbc.co.uk] for an inspirational story by a blind man who got to one of the most powerful positions in the UK govt (the fact he was awful there had very little to do with his blindness).
Why not.. (Score:2, Informative)
If we're working on making a touch screen phone more accessible to the sightless, why not ditch the screen entirely and replace it with a tactile display capable of adapting to the needs of the user? This would make it possible to still have your email or even text messages right at your fingertips - literally!
Here's a prototype that I'm sure could be improved upon and made portable given the right amount of funding.
http://www.nist.gov/public_affairs/factsheet/visualdisplay.htm [nist.gov]
Re:Brilliant (Score:2, Informative)
This isn't innovative - see mouse gestures, pie menus, even context menus that pop up where you first click, and not in a predefined place.
Now if this guy Raman had instead invented Raman Noodles ...
Re:That's pretty cool (Score:1, Informative)
In my opinion (take it for what it is), this is useful for different situations. Ideally, you could have a device capable of this type of dialing and voice recognition. There are places where voice recognition is not the best choice. Say you're in a public place & there's a lot of background noise. The device isn't necessarily able to pick out the commands from the other stuff. On the other hand, it may be much easier to utilize voice recognition then to fumble around with your phone trying to dial with the touch screen. Of course, take this with a grain of salt. I'm not disabled so I can't really speak for those who are.
Re:Brilliant (Score:2, Informative)
Yeah exactly ;-)
I was actually being very tongue in cheek.
As for the dtmf, I meant something a bit more user friendly, like having a digitized voice that would say it blind people.
It's not like cellphones require dtmf to dial out...