“The proliferation of touchscreen technology may have revolutionized mobile computer input for most everyone, but there’s one sector of the population that isn’t exactly feeling the pinch, the tap, or the swipe: the blind,” Christina Bonnington reports for Wired. “It’s nearly impossible to interact with elements on a totally smooth screen if you can’t see.”
“iBrailler Notes, which began as a summer project at Stanford University in 2011 and is now available as a stand-alone app for iOS, aims to offer blind and vision-impaired iPad users an easy way to type Braille notes and perform basic word processing on a touchscreen,” Bonnington reports. “iBrailler isn’t the first to undertake this commercially… [But] what iBrailler does differently is position its touch keyboard underneath the user’s fingertips, no matter where they set them on the iPad’s slick glass display. Every time you lift and readjust your hands on the screen, the keyboard does too. The keyboard uses Braille English Grade 1, Grade 2, and Six-Dot Computer Braille, and features built-in gestures for tasks like cutting, copying, and pasting text.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Note: UPDATE: January 29, 2015, 11:15am EDT:
There are some factual errors in the Wired article above. Please see the following for more information:
You know, blind people can actually use touchscreens – January 29, 2015
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Arline M.” for the heads up.]
That’s pathetic. We can do that with iOS as it is. We blind folks don’t need stupid developers who aren’t even informed about voiceover or any other accessibility solution that apple offers. And the reporter obviously didn’t research the subject well at all. Oh yes, and I’m a blind person tapping away on my iPhone 6, if you must know, and don’t need any stupid third party keyboard to do it with, either. Apple’s software keyboard is very easy to use for anyone that has learned to type, which is most of the blind community that is even remotely educated.
Sent from my iPhone
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How long have you used iPhones, and what kinds of things do you use them for? I read a story about a blind man using his iPhone to go for walks in the woods.