A team from Georgia Tech, led by Post Doctorate Fellow Mario Romero of the School of Interactive Computing, has designed BrailleTouch for touchscreen mobile devices. The prototype app allows visually impaired people to easily type and opens the door for everyone to text or type without looking at the screen.
Transcript
00:00:05 They pull out their iPhone. They pull out their keyboard. They have to connect them. The iPhone is about $200 with the phone plan. The keyboard is $1,700. You don’t have enough lap space or peace of mind to have all that hardware out in the open. So what we’ve developed is a solution that allows you to type directly on the phone. It’s called BrailleTouch. I’m going to demo that if you rotate the screen, it rotates with you so you don’t have to worry about how you’re holding the phone. (Demonstration) This is great for people to know how to type Braille. You don’t need to know how to read Braille. That’s a different task. Reading Braille is hard. We’ve determined through our studies that users can pick it up, without any training,
00:01:03 and start typing faster than most people can type on a normal QWERTY computer. My colleagues and I learned in a few hours while typing on our BrailleTouch device. This definitely does not solve the issue of texting and driving. BrailleTouch is not a solution for keeping your eyes on the road while texting. It’s more complex than that. There are cognitive centers in the brain that would be overloaded if you did both tasks at once. It’s like trying to develop a pill for drinking and driving. It’s just not a good idea.
