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Google Android perfects touchscreen dialing for the blind

By arunenigma on Saturday, April 4, 2009 with 0 comments



It’s easy in interface design to forget about the disabled, but if there’s one thing that is undeniably true, it’s that the digital era has excluded the blind far more than it has excluded any other group. Take the web, for example: most web pages are completely unnavigable by the blind. But as even traditionally analog interfaces like the buttons on the face of a telephone are replaced by virtual buttons on a touchscreen, things are only going to get worse for the blind before they get better.

Cue Google Android. T.V. Raman, a blind engineer at Google, have developed software that makes the touchscreen of the T-Mobile G1 a lot more usable by blind users. And the solution they’ve come up to the dialing problem is as simple as it is ingenious.

Imagine trying to allow a blind user to dial a number on a touchscreen cell phone. Your first thought would probably be to try to program a complicate voice-recognition program. But there’s a simpler solution. When a blind user dials a cell phone with physical buttons, it’s easy: all the buttons are in a standard place and can be located through tactility. The tactile feedback of the bumps of a cell phone’s buttons are not available on a touchscreen phone… but what Raman has realized is they don’t need to be.

His solution assumes that the first place on a touchscreen your finger hits is the “5″ key. From there, a swish to the right becomes a “1″, or diagonally up and to the left becomes a “1.” Take your finger off the screen, and the entry system resets.

A niche solution to be sure. But we’re closer to perfecting software interfaces for the blind than curing blindness itself. As interfaces become less analog and more digitally ephemeral, these sort of innovations will make the already hardy lives for tens of thousands of people easier. Kudos, Google.

Category: android , current news

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