Braille-like texting app speeds up typing on smartphones
February 21, 2012
BrailleTouch (credit: Georgia Tech)
Ever need to text a note under the table during a meeting or during class without anyone knowing it?
Georgia Tech researchers have a solution: a free open-source iPhone app called BrailleTouch.
No, it’s not a solution for texting while driving.
“Research has shown that chorded, or gesture-based, texting is a viable solution for eyes-free written communication in the future,” says Mario Romero, Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Interactive Computing (IC) and the project’s principal investigator.
BrailleTouch incorporates the Braille writing system used by the visually impaired. Using six fingers, it lets you type at up to 32 words per minute with 92 percent accuracy — at least six times faster than other research prototypes for eyes-free texting.
Universal texting app
Romero thinks BrailleTouch could be a universal eyes-free mobile texting app that replaces soft QWERTY keyboards and other texting technologies. For the blind, it replaces expensive proprietary Braille keyboard devices, which typically cost thousands of dollars, he says.
The six-key configuration allows the keyboard to fit on the screen and lets you keep your fingers in a relatively fixed position while texting. You hold the device with the screen facing away from you, cradling the device with your palms or pinkies and thumbs so you can type with a majority of your fingers. This is identical to typing Braille on a standard keyboard.
The research group has developed iPhone and iPad versions of BrailleTouch (not yet available in iTunes) and is currently working on Android versions. The app recently won the MobileHCI 2011 competition for design at the MobileHCI conference in Stockholm, Sweden.
Comments (2)
by Nils Davis
The good thing about a chording approach is that you could make the chords themselves orientation-independent (it constrains your options a bit, but should still leave you with enough expressiveness to type the alphabet + numbers + some meta keys). In turn, that removes a bit of the need for tactile feedback. You could then move the input device from the phone’s screen onto any surface, such as sewing it into your clothes, enabling you to do texting OR typing without a keyboard. Combine that with some augmented reality glasses so you can see what you’re typing, which is the subject of another article in this week’s Kurzweil newsletter, and you might achieve the first part of Vinge’s vision in “Rainbows End.”
by Dan Robinson
So, another version of text “chord keyboard” (multiple keys pressed at once). I was working to invent it back in the 1980s, but found IBM already had a version. Then I went to what I called the Electric Glove, until I was told of an article in Scientific American. I think someone was calling it a Power Glove, for game playing, with sensors at each major knuckle. In my version it would’ve potentially had 14 (including 3D wrist action) three-position switches on both hands, with ‘instant” possible meanings in the trillions, for computers and people who could handle that.
But with multiple simultaneous inputs, I’d think tactile feedback would be very important. I recently realized that’s something that doesn’t seem likely for a while with screen-based keys.