Visually Impaired?

[Joseph Reeves]

My very first thought...

How about overlaying the screen with a sheet of rubber buttons? I'm
thinking of the sort of thing that you get inside cheap mobile phones,
TV remotes, pocket calculators; that sort of stuff. The number 5 would
have the bump on it and the keys would simply push against the
touchscreen. Let me know if that's not a great description...

It's likely to be overkill, but it would be a quick way of producing a
proof of concept model. Later on you could remove the screen and put
regular buttons in.

Then you'd just need the software, which should be more than doable.

I think you've got a great idea,

Joseph



2008/7/11 John Whitmore <captain.deadly at gmail.com>:
> 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.
>
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