Developing "Eyes-Free" Gadgets and Applications

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.

Comments

Brilliant

[Skiron]

"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..."

So simple yet so brilliant. There is so much tripe published about 'innovation' (usually Microsoft), yet I think this is the first time _I_ can use this word properly.

Well done Mr. Raman - truly brilliant.

Re:Brilliant

[Nuitari The Wiz]

How a bout having a set of predefined buttons with a small bump so that the number 5 can easily be identified. The buttons could be placed in some sort of logical order, let's say in ascending numbers, 3 each row. We could also add * # Send and End as buttons.

It might look something like that:
S E
1 2 3
4 5 6
7 8 9
* 0 #

What would really be cool and useful too is to make sure that when someone presses a button it also feels like its been pressed.

As an aside, a cool feature would be the cellphone speaker phone saying the number that was pressed as someone dialed. _That_ would be useful.

Re:Reading Signs

[djupedal]

>Seriously, even if you're not blind, the fact that you have to pull it out of your pocket to use is a pain in the ass.

Yeah, because technology such as 'hands-free Bluetooth' hasn't been invented yet on your planet.

When I'm using an earwig or in the car, the phone stays in the pocket...everything, from connecting to the car to taking calls happens automatically or via voice control - what a country.

Re:They should follow the Screenless MP3 Player.

[rusty0101]

One of the down sides to hardware that has no screen on it is that there is not a sufficient market for general use, and as a result the cost to the consumer is significantly higher. Braile readers for example end up being hand made because there isn't a sufficient demand to mass produce them, but the result is a display that's one or possibly 2 lines of text, that costs a couple hundred to a couple thousand dollars to produce.

Part of the idea of what Raman is doing is taking existing consumer hardware and applying software solutions to make them more usable to the blind.

A similar solution would be to use a cell phone to convert the words a person is speaking into text that a deaf person could read. You could build into it language recognition and translation and the deaf person on the bus next to you on your next tour of Europe, Japan, China, etc. may get more out of what is going on around you than you do.

A screen free MP3 player may sound like something that a blind user would appreciate, especially if the control hardware, and the audio menus were well designed. The big problem becomes one of what all the device can do. Adding a camera to a device like this seems somewhat counter intuitive from a consumer goods perspective, even if the hardware cost were just additional pennies. How about gps location hardware. Again just pennies, but to build it into that MP3 player doesn't seem to make all that much sense, does it. Add in a compass and an accelerometer, and you have a navigation aid that a blind user could use to get almost anywhere with.

The thing is that pretty much everything described is in a G1, so really adding usability for the blind is primarily a matter of plugging into the user interface with something that converts text to speech and where possible images to text. Both of those are partially solved problems. The part that's still difficult is getting it all tied together, and making available sufficient processing power to make it operate cleanly.