Can Braille be faster than QWERTY? App developer thinks so

By John D.  Sutter, CNN

(CNN) -- If Mario Romero has his way, we'll all be learning Braille soon.

The post-doc researcher at Georgia Tech University has co-developed an app, 
called BrailleTouch, that could help blind people send text messages and 
type e-mails on touch-screen smartphones without the need for expensive, 
extra equipment.  To use the app, people hold their phones with the screens 
facing away from them and punch combinations of six touch-screen buttons to 
form characters.  The app speaks a letter aloud after it's been registered, 
so there's no need to see the screen.

The system is designed for blind and visually impaired people, who otherwise 
have to purchase thousand-dollar machines or cumbersome "hover-over" (more 
on that later) keyboards to be able to type on no-button smartphones.  But 
Romero sees a spin-off for the technology: The touch-screen Braille keyboard 
is so fast that sighted people may start using it, too.

"It may be a solution for everybody to get their eyes off their phone so 
they can walk and text or watch TV and make a comment on a blog," he said by 
phone.  "It may free the sighted people's eyes" and help visually impaired 
people to type more easily.

The free app, which is being developed for Apple iOS and Google Android 
devices, should be available in a matter of weeks, he said.

So far, the app has only undergone limited tests, and Romero declined to 
make a pre-release version available to CNN.  In an
11-person trial, however, he said, some Braille typists were able to go 
faster than they could on standard, QWERTY keyboards.  One visually impaired 
person, who was already familiar with Braille
(you punch the six keys in various combinations to make letters) typed at a 
rate of 32 words per minute, Romero said, with 92% accuracy.  Romero 
himself, who never had used a Braille keyboard before, was able to type at 
about 25 words per minute with 100% accuracy after a week of practice, he 
said.

The app will undergo more rigorous testing before it's released, said 
Romero, who is a post-doctoral researcher at the university's School of 
Interactive Computing.  It was developed with the help of Brian Frey, 
Gregory Abowd, James Clawson and Kate Rosier.

Smartphones are generally pretty good at reading material on their screens 
to people who have vision problems, he said, but it's usually difficult to 
enter text on the devices.  To get a sense of what it's like for a blind 
person to use an iPhone you can go to Settings, General Accessibility, and 
turn the "VoiceOver" feature on.  When you touch a menu item, the iPhone 
reads the text aloud in a computerized voice.  To select something on the 
screen, you double-tap that item.  To scroll, you use three fingers.

All that works well, Romero said, but typing on an iPhone without buttons is 
a pain.  Another alternative, he said, is attaching a hardware Braille 
keyboard to a smarpthone, but those are difficult to carry and are 
expensive:

"The options (blind people) have right now are either too expensive and 
cumbersome or too slow.  Virtual keyboards and soft keyboards -- like 
Apple's voice-over keyboard -- are too slow. Or they have options to get 
hardware that costs several thousand dollars."

The new app may not alleviate all of those problems.  On Android phones, the 
BrailleTouch app can be programmed in as the phone's standard keyboard. 
Because of restrictions on iOS, he said, that can't happen on an iPhone, so 
people who want to use the BrailleTouch keyboard have to open the app, type 
into a text document and then copy-paste that into an e-mail or text 
message.

Romero admits that this app isn't the end-all-be-all in typing. But it's 
helping create a future, as he said, when "one day we're not slaves to the 
screens."

Post by: John D.  Sutter -- CNN

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