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.
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A new technology developed at Georgia Tech, however, makes touchscreens more accessible to the estimated 22 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-based VoiceOver mode, for instance, reads aloud whatever text someone touches on the screen. 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. 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.”
This story originally published on Mashable here.
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