Each summer, Stanford University invites students from around the United States to come up with innovative applications for computers. This year's winning team came up with a touchscreen keyboard for the blind, than brings Braille to the iPad. "Originally, our assignment was to create a character-recognition application that would use the camera on a mobile device -- a phone or tablet -- to transform pages of Braille into readable text," said New Mexico State University undergraduate Adam Duran.
But once he stumbled through various hurdles -- how does a blind person orient a printed page so that the computer knows which side is up, or ensure proper lighting of the paper? -- he ditched the assignment. "It was a cool challenge, but not exactly where we ended up."
Instead, they turned the problem around and tasked themselves with coming up with a way for blind people to type Braille into the tablet themselves. "The killer app was not a reader, but a writer," said Stanford's Sohan Dharmaraja.
You can already get keyboards for the blind. They've got eight buttons and pressing six of them in various configurations lets a visually impaired person type any letter of the Braille alphabet. But they're bulky, not portable and extremely expensive.
An iPad or an Android tablet would be much better suited, but how does a blind person find the keys on a flat, uniformly smooth glass panel?
The team soon found the solution: instead of making virtual keys that the fingers must find, why not make keys that automatically find the fingers.
The user simply touches eight fingertips to the glass, and the keys orient themselves to the fingers. Become disoriented, and reset by lifting and placing down the fingers. To enter a menu, the user shakes the device and it enters that mode -- then by sliding a finger across the screen, different menu options are available, and a robotic voice speaks out the currently highlighted option.
These touchscreens can actually be better because "they're customizable," Dharmaraja noted. "They can accommodate users whose fingers are small or large, those who type with fingers close together or far apart, even to allow a user to type on a tablet hanging around the neck with hands opposed as if playing a clarinet."
Don't expect to see it appear on the App Store or Android Market yet -- "there are technical and legal hurdles to address," a spokesperson for Stanford said. "But someday, perhaps soon, the blind and visually impaired may find themselves with a more cost-effective Braille writer."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
