I have a few problems with this article. I do not currently use either an
Iphone or any similar device. Maybe a braille app. would be useful to those
of us who have used braille all our lives, I doubt that sighted people would
take the time to learn braille considering that they have not adopted
auditory systems. It seems to me like learning braille would take more
effort on a sighted person's part than learning to listen. Additionally,
this article seems to me to suggest that a sighted person could quickly
learn and use braille. Additionally, we already have a lot of sighted
people who do dangerous things like driving a car and texting at the same
time. Not having to look at the screen doesn't mean the whole thing would
be automatic and require no concentration. It seems to me that a sighted
person, would need to think about what is being written, and which dots to
activate in the braille would take his or her ability to concentrate on
driving safely. There is more to using braille than being able to feel it.
Marilyn Lutter
----- Original Message -----
From: "Sun Sounds of Arizona" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Wednesday, February 22, 2012 12:11 PM
Subject: Re: [VICUG-L] Can Braille Be Faster Than QWRTY?
Though I hear where your coming from, lets not over react to a short article
which didn't have the space to be as comprehensive as you might have liked.
First off, though Braille displays are coming down in price, they are still
very expensive for the vast majority of people. This is not a rap on Braille
displays, just a fact. I don't think he was mixing up the difference between
input and output, I think he was assuming the use of a Braille display with
a Braille keyboard as an input device.
Though I agree that many blind people are very facile with IOS devices, the
ease of use does vary among blind users, and I, for one, would love a
virtual Braille input mode. It's all about choices. This doesn't prevent a
blind person from using querty, just provides still another option.
Whether sighted people would use it or not is kind of beside the point. They
might, they probably wouldn't as there would be a significant learning
curve, but sighted people do text without looking all the time. My sighted
son is really fast at it. He can be talking to me and watching TV, and still
hold the phone in his lap and text with his thumbs very quickly.
You are dead on though, sighted people would never choose voice input and
output over print if they had to take only one or the other. Neither should
blind people be expected to accept voice only interfaces. WE should have
choices. I see no problem with this product development and can forgive any
minor hype associated with it as sales jargon.
Bill
-----Original Message-----
From: Visually Impaired Computer Users' Group List
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of David hilbert Poehlman
Sent: Tuesday, February 21, 2012 5:25 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [VICUG-L] Can Braille Be Faster Than QWRTY?
A few things that make me mad about this article.
1> it's a big deal to have to cut text from a special app in order to paste
it somewhere else which is why I have not pursued braille and touch.
2> braille displays are coming down in price all the time and some of them
are quite small and if you cannot hear and need to use any smart phone on
the market, you'll need a braille display. So, let's stop the bad rap on
braille displays please or at least serve the stick of it with a carrot?
3> I've been using ios with voiceover since it was first released and while
it has improved to a degree, one thing that has not changed is that the
consistancy of the interface and the ease with which it can be interacted
with gets easier with practice. There many voice over users who really fly
using the ios virtual keyboard and while I am not one of them,I do not
consider it to be a "pain" to use. What is a pain to use is a tiny keyboard
which is faintly marked and when you tap a key, sometimes, you are tapping
two keys at once. I've never had this type of issue on the smooth flat,
clean screen of an ios device. Apple introduced a "touch typing mode" on
ios so that if you desire, you can mov your finger directly to the character
and lift it and it will be entered. one finger! think of it folks. If you
are good spatially or practice, you can get quite fast at this. It is also
easy to recover from an error with the undo command.
4> does anyone know any sighted person who has foregone vision for audio?
even in touch typing, they look at what's going onto the screen or what goes
onto the paper.
5> The article seems to indicate that using voiceover is unpleaseant with
its cursory glance at how voiceover is used. I find the voice to be
pleasant and the interface intuitive. after all, how many keystrokes do you
need? We've got a lot of keystrokes being replaced with a few simple
gestures.
6> Do your home work before writing another article that mentions voiceover.
go to:
http://www.apple.com/accessibility/iphone/vision.html
and have a real good look at and site the page in any articles.
On Feb 21, 2012, at 4:59 AM, peter altschul wrote:
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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Archived on the World Wide Web at
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