Visually Impaired?

[John Whitmore]

Hello All,
     firstly I'm a listener on this list not a poster. Waiting for my 
FreeRunner and then I'll have more relevant contributions, if any.

I'm not visually Impaired or blind but I'm very curious about them. At 
present on a phone there is a wee nipple, (for want of a better word) on 
the "5" key so that people can feel it and know where they are. (That's 
great but what's better to my mind is that all the Euro Bank Notes have 
different markers on them so that blind people know how much money 
they're handing over, and being handed back. Keep trying to find the 
markers but still can't distinguish them.)

Back on point of this question. Do blind people use phones and if so how 
will a blind person use a phone with no keypad, (and hence the nipple)? 
Actually given that the person is blind you could get rid of the screen 
altogether?

This may all seem a bit off topic but I thought that FreeRunner with the 
gesture stuff would be so brilliant for blind people. Started thinking 
that if you could tap morse on the phone and have it detected and 
converted into text that'd be brilliant. Perhaps Blind people have 
special phones?

If I knew a blind person I could find out.

Perhaps there's a project in taking a FreeRunner and removing the 
screen, (either VGA or QVGA I don't care ;-) and have really good speech 
recognition in it and for get the morse altogether. Could the phone read 
out an SMS message?

what a first post! Sorry.