TV Raman, Google's accessibility engineer, is working on an accessible touch screen phone for blind people. It was reported in a New York Times story which you can read at http://tinyurl.com/845z67. He 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.
Mark On 19 Jan 2009, at 12:38, Darragh wrote:
Tim,From what I gather from their brief press release, they mean to use moon to show the objects on the screen as their constantly changing. Speaking the feedback is one thing when the buttons aren't moving all over the place but when you have to find the buttons first then another way needs to be devised.I thought they'd actually just do something with TTS so that as you moved over the screen with your finger it would sspeak the element you were on. when you wanted to activate it, you'd just double- click it.But, it's a step in the right direction ad that's reason enough to be happy.Darragh Blog and Linux accessibility walk-through's: www.digitaldarragh.com -----Original Message----- From: vicsireland-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx on behalf of Tim Culhane Sent: Mon 19/01/2009 10:30 To: vicsireland@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: [vicsireland] Re: "iPhone from the blind" post Hi,They have to be joking? developing an alternative interface for the iPhoneand then use a system used by practically nobody?Having said that, I've not heard how this skin works. Why do you mean moon, or even braille letters on a keypad, when presumably it is either a modified querty keypad or phone keypad. None of us have braille on ourphones or computer keypads.As long as you can learn the keybord and there is speech feedback forinput and output, then surely this would work? Tim -----Original Message----- From: vicsireland-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:vicsireland-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Darragh Sent: 17 January 2009 19:10 To: vicsireland@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: [vicsireland] Re: "iPhone from the blind" post ExcelentI saw this on http://www.dialaphone.co.uk/blog/?p=2416 a few days ago too. Looks very interesting, although I don't know if I'd like reading moon.Put the briefest of blog entries up on Thursday over at http://www.digitaldarragh.com/post/Accessible-iPhone-for-the-blind-is-availa ble.aspx Glad your still reading. From: vicsireland-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:vicsireland-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Declan Meenagh Sent: 16 January 2009 18:15 To: vicsireland@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: [vicsireland] "iPhone from the blind" postHi Everyone. I've just wrote a post about the suggested iPhone case which would help blind users access it. I'd appreciate any comments on the post,here's the link: http://declan06.blogspot.com/2009/01/accessible-iphone.html#links Thanks and have a good weekend, -Declanwww.DeclanMeenagh.com || DMeenagh@xxxxxxxxx || Declan.P.Meenagh@xxxxxxxLInkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/declanmeenagh ~ Its Coming, and it's going to be EPIC! ~ http://www.epiccon.info/ ~ You can't stop the signal! ~ http://signal.serenityfirefly.com/ <winmail.dat>
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