Have you ever felt the need to text a friend while being held up in a boring meeting? Or maybe you have found it difficult to type on your smartphone while simultaneously working out or watching TV. Now you can effectively multitask and text notes, with the new texting app from Georgia Tech which won the MobileHCI 2011 competition for design at the MobileHCI conference in Stockholm, Sweden.
Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology, headed by principal investigators, Mario Romero and Gregory Abowd, developed a prototype texting app, called BrailleTouch after extensive usability studies. The research confirmed that the gesture-based or chorded texting technology that BrailleTouch uses will be a viable solution for eyes-free written communication in the future. This smart app makes it possible to key in letters on your touch screen device, by using only finger gestures, thereby eliminating the need for sight to type on your smartphone or tablet.
Here are some interesting facts about BrailleTouch:
- The BrailleTouch is a free open-source app that integrates the popular Braille writing system used by the visually impaired.
- It is relatively simple and easy to use the Braille alphabet. Both visually impaired as well as sighted users would find it easy to use this app on smartphones or tablets.
- The BrailleTouch eliminates the need for expensive proprietary Braille keyboard devices.
- BrailleTouch is currently the only iPhone app that employs a six-finger chording process that replicates the traditional Braille keyboard.
- BrailleTouch has been specifically designed to meet the limitations of both soft and physical keyboards.
- This app works by using a gesture-based solution that turns the iPhone’s touch screen into a soft-touch keyboard that requires only six keys.
- Users of BrailleTouch can keep their fingers in a relatively fixed position while texting with the six-key configuration that makes the keyboard fit on the screen.
To test the prototype app for the iPhone, Georgia Tech conducted studies with visually impaired participants who were skilled in Braille typing. The results proved that a user can input at least six times the number of words per minute, with the participants being able to reach a speed of 32 words per minute with 92 percent accuracy when compared with other such eyes-free texting apps.
You can watch the BrailleTouch app in action at this
