The evolution of phones away from physical buttons toward touchscreens is great if you're into clean, aesthetic design. But, if you're suffering from limited vision, there are some obvious issues. Thankfully the
iPhone 4 at least has support for Braille displays like those Brailliant, as kindly demonstrated by acoustic guitar virtuoso and software guru Victor Tasaran. Using the six buttons on his Brailliant-32 he's able to navigate across icons, then feel the text beneath each one -- or wait for the phone's hurried text-to-speech to read back to him. It's an encouraging solution for smartphone accessibility, but does have a rather negative impact on portability -- and, we're sad to say, on cost as well. His 32-character unit will set you back just under $4k, which is many times the cost of the phone itself. But, at least when it's used like in the video below, sitting on the table, he won't have to worry about
signal issues.
Update: To be clear the text-to-speech is entirely being generated by the phone; it's a stock feature of iOS 4. The Brailliant is enabling Victor to cycle through icons, make selections, and "read" the on-screen text with his fingers.
posted July 13th 2010 9:28AM
@InspectorEngadget
Because blind people drive??
@tobsmonster2 Yes. That was the joke. Good job. :facepalm:
@Locust
No I think "hole me over" is what he meant.... if you get what I mean xD
Apple's products are usually very good in the accessibility area. OS X's text-to-speech, zooming, alternate color schemes, visual alerts, and accommodations for difficulties typing are very easy to access.
Funny how that idiot at Forbes missed this too.
Haven't both Apple and Nokia been developing some kind of haptic/tactile touch screens. This here looks like a temporary solution that borderlines on ridiculous.
But what do I know. I looked at the picture and thought it's someone dropping his iPhone into a shredder.
here i the funny thing ......nokia had a braille app from years ago
and they didn't make a big deal about it
since they support haptic feed back
apple ...........a 3rd party developer just did it and it's like something new to the world
Any of you noticed that girl is blind too? This is just great what they did.
The blurriness is fork in the eye stuff.
This 32 cell braille display can hamper portability, however 12 cell displays are available and I think I remember hearing of an 8 cell display.
Smaller braille displays of course come at a cost, as each cell represents one character, and if you can't display a whole line of text at once, you have to page up and down to read the whole line.
Another neat feature of Bluetooth braille displays is that some of them have an incorporated 7 button keyboard. People that know braille can type using only 6 keys and a space key.
That makes for a pretty portable bluetooth keyboard for the iPhone.
Specialized PDAs for the blind can run pretty steep.
The option to only get the braille display and an iPhone is actually relatively cheep. and you get a pretty good accessible phone as well.
I pre-ordered my iPhone from www.iSelfoon.com, I just got it today and absolutely love it!!
wow it helps millions of people now
Come on ! Where is the iPhone 4 antenna jokes????
Come on people ! You know that :)
@ewlung
gtfo
@ewlung
Nobody cares.
Focus! Focus!
I usually bash on these kind of comments but this really isn't newsworthy, maybe on alt but not front page.
some other smartphone platforms have offered read-aloud menus for the blind for years(the first time i remember seeing such was in 2004 or so, on s80, s60 has some on offer for more modern).
it's one of the things that make smartphones more usable than normal phones, by more people anyways.
but.. on-screen braille will be here in the 5-10 years lifetime(think all those patens for touchscreens that offer raising the display on parts to signify where the button area is).
I miss my first gen iPhone in version 1.3. I tell you that was the best phone ever. Rite now I own an iPhone 3GS and I'm really thinking about the iPhone 4 or an android. I would like to get the evo 4g but it doesn't feel rite in my hands. But this antenna problem is holding me back. I just want the truth and seems like everyone is lying. Well I just wait a couple of months to see
This phone can do everything except be a phone. They should call it the iPod, wait they have that already,
This guy makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside, bein' all happy and stuff.
OMG another iphone article.... who would have thought...
@ElectroGuru
And another comment from you about there being another iphone article. Not the sharpest tool in the box, are you? Let me explain. Engadget make money based on traffic to the site. The more people that read Apple articles, the more traffic those articles receive, the more money Engadget makes. Every time you click though to an iPhone article, you're actually encouraging Engadget to to post more iPhone articles. So here's a novel idea. Don't read the article, and don't comment on the article. If everyone that disliked iPhone did the same, the number of articles would inevitably fall. You want to complain about there being too many iPhone article, how about emailing the editors directly?