Eyes-Free shell for Android actually delivers on its name
By Donald Melanson 
posted April 3rd 2009 4:28PM
posted April 3rd 2009 4:28PM
There's certainly no shortage of means to customize your Android experience, but there's few tweaks as innovative as this new Eyes-Free shell developed by Charles Chen and T.V. Raman., which makes the handset more accessible to the blind, or anyone simply looking to make a call without having to divert their attention. As those following Android development may be aware, the underlying code for the shell has actually been available for some time, but it's only just now been made available to general G1-toting public on Android Marketplace. One of the stand-out components is the brilliantly simple dialer, which automatically brings up a 5 no matter where you touch the screen, from which you can then simply slide your finger to dial the rest of the numbers, with an audible click providing some added assurance as you move over the numbers. Things don't stop there, of course, with the shell also able to provide things like single-touch access for the current date and time, audible notifications of battery life and signal strength, and even a mini app that draws on the phone's GPS capabilities to announce your present location. Head on past the break for a quick video of dialer, and dive into the read link below for a more thorough overview.
Sounds pretty good for blind people or so, but for mainstream use...
And his accent is just great :p
I'm not blind and I'm itching for a media player that supports this. I listen to podcasts on my commute to work twice a day, and using touch screen to skip an episode, pause or change volume while driving is pretty much impossible without looking, and hence dieing.
"jeRRY is A Very, Very, BaD Man". :)
If you're blind, this still won't help you see anything...
From the Read link: "Target uses range from eyes-busy environments like driving..."
This is great! Let's encourage people to use their cell phones MORE while driving! /sarcasm
Some idiots use their cell phones on the road no matter what you tell them. Here in california it's illegal to drive and talk without a headset but that doesn't stop anyone. At least this way they can still look at the road while they're dialing.
I think the blind would prefer actual buttons with braille - this is not useful
+1
not necessarily. actually, the number of blind or visually impaired people who actually read braille is low. with the advent of so much technology (typing on computers with screen readers/magnifiers), and so forth, fewer and fewer people are learning braille.
also, people who lose their vision later in life are probably less likely to learn braille.
for a good set of resources, check out the san francisco lighthouse for the blind and visually impaired, along with their blog and twitter pages.
http://lighthouse-sf.org/
http://www.lighthouse-sf.org/blog/
http://twitter.com/lighthouse_sf
Very clever.
really wish he showed us how to dial zero -- two down swipes? down...and then further down? it's actually a very usable idea, but i'd like to see the zero, # and * implemented before it's super useful to me. it may be better for t9 texting than it is to simply dial -- voice dialing might be the most efficient way to dial "eyes free" in my opinion.
interesting conscept, but i'd really like to use this more in texting which i used to do on my non-touchscreen phone without looking at the keypad. now i have to look at the keypad, and this method wouldn't really help where instead of 9 buttons i have over 26 ( i can't remember the number of the buttons and i don't feel like checking) also, anyone else notice that 0 is not on there? how do you deal with that ? hmmmm
But the G1 has a physical keyboard, can't you just use that for texting eyes-free?
@caramel - That would be feasible... if the G1 didn't have a wide two-handed keyboard. I fear the driver on the road who is texting on that.
Blackberry-style phones are better for one-handed on-the-road texting. Which no one should do anyways (but the world is still populated by idiots so we can't stop them).
What we REALLY need is a good speech-to-text for phones.
Great feature!
Boring video.......
cool
A touchscreen for the blind? How is this remotely useful?
"Hey, look at my wallpaper. Isn't it cool? I love the way it looks on the screen...."
Yeah, I'm not really sure why a screened phone would be a big purchase for a blind person, especially one where the entire phone is focused around the screen.
... please consider JAWS. this is the most common screen reader used on computers by blind people. if you've seen it in action, as the user moves the mouse cursor around, JAWS reads back whatever the cursor is pointing at.
now imagine that your finger is the mouse pointer. and the screen reader on the touch screen device would 'read back', in order to give audio feedback as to what is happening with the device.
in much the same way, auditory clicks or distinctive sounds could serve the same purpose. but language is probably easier than random clicks and chirps.
- kyle.
Well whether this is useful to blind people or not, the concept is really nice. With a little more advancement you wouldn't need to have an onscreen keyboard hogging up all of the screen real estate, you'd just type wherever you wanted. Like he said, the keypad that pops up is just a crutch, you wouldn't need anything telling you where the keys are. People can already type on computer keyboards and physical phone keyboards w/o looking at the keys, so why are touchscreen users stuck looking at the screen to type?
check out data's life form song on youtube
O...M....G What an AGONIZING video. GET TO THE Freaking POINT!
why would a blind person use a touchscreen!
whats wrong with a standard normal keypad.
idiotic idea
how do you dial zero?