A little bit of lateral thinking by the Nokia Beta Labs team sees Braille Reader coming to touchscreen S60 5th Edition phones, making the most of both touch and haptic feedback. I'm not qualified to comment on its usefulness, but see below for the launch video.
Read on in the full article.
I thought that this an April's 1st joke... I mean how will blind people select the app? And what's the purpose? Something like text-to-speech is much more useful....
Al3xandr3 wrote:I thought that this an April's 1st joke... I mean how will blind people select the app? And what's the purpose? Something like text-to-speech is much more useful....
I would imagine that this is only a proof of concept experiment and any real world app would be started by having an entire haptic user interface.
I can't think of a purpose either, but there usually is something that the unaffected overlook.
I believe that Nokia's newer phones come with an audio-based interface for blind users. Non-touch devices, mind you, but Nokia's definitely experimenting in that direction now.
Well, perhaps its not so nice to have your messages read out loud by a machine voice in public places for example.
Second, it should be easy to set it up such that there is a big icon for it on the homescreen to launch it easily. Third, its running on the background anyway so its not like the user would have to be launching it frequently.
Good work, Nokia.
viipottaja wrote:Well, perhaps its not so nice to have your messages read out loud by a machine voice in public places for example.
Because nobody has invented, an earpiece or headset connected by wire or bluetooth yet.
This is useful for people who are unlucky to be both blind and deft.
Excellent job by Nokia as usual.
This is a great invention by Nokia. Combined use of this app with a screen reader like Talks will enable blind and low vision users like myself to read messages ourselves rather then having the screen reader software speak it aloud. However screen reader software hasn't caught up with touch screen phones yet. The visualy impaired are still on Symbian 3.
Unregistered wrote:This is useful for people who are unlucky to be both blind and deft.
I have a friend who is visually impaired, I know how difficult is it for him to read text messages. Kudos to Nokia for at least trying to come up with something like this.