New Touch Screen Breakthrough May Make iPhones Useful to Visually Impaired

In all the excitement over touch screen interfaces, first on monitors and now tablet PCs, iPhones and Blackberries, it's easy to forget that such devices lose their luster for the visually impaired. Sure, there's screen reading software to read the text to the blind user, but that doesn't help with inputting information.

One solution is tiny mechanical pins that raise and lower to represent Braille lettering, but the power requirements are more than most mobile gadgetry can handle without being plugged in.

Researchers at the University of Tampere in Finland may have a solution: Electronic pulses through piezoelectrical material found in some touch screens, in this case the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet.



From NewScientist, Tech Section:

In Braille, letters are encoded using a two-by-three matrix in which each character is represented by a different configuration of raised and absent dots at the six locations. To display these dots on a touch-screen device,Jussi Rantala of the University of Tampere in Finland and colleagues used a Nokia 770 Internet Tablet, which has a piezoelectric material built into the touch screen that vibrates when an electric signal is applied to it. The team installed software that represents a raised dot as a single pulse of intense vibration, and an absent dot as a longer vibration made up of several weaker pulses (see diagram).

To discover how visually impaired volunteers would prefer to receive these vibrations, the team developed two different presentation methods. In the first, the user touches the screen on the left-hand side to read whether or not there is a bump in that position of the matrix, then moves their finger horizontally across the screen to read the remaining five dots. "But it wasn't that easy to read," saysRantala.

In the second method, the user simply places a finger anywhere on the screen and holds it still. The phone then displays a character by vibrating the sequence of six dots, each 360 milliseconds apart. "It took some time for them to start reading, because this representation is totally different from anything else that they had previously used," saysRantala. But once the volunteers were used to it, they were able to speed it up and read a character in as little as 1.25 seconds.

The team's next step will be to present entire words and sentences. Screen-reading software is already available that "grabs" information displayed as text and turns it into speech. The same information could be turned into Braille characters on phones with vibrating touch screens, says Rantala.

Given its current state it'll be a few years until the technology makes its way to your mobile devices, but the early results are definitely promising and encouraging.Though I wonder how useful a Braille-ready phone would be; it seems like Braille on a 3-inch touch screen reaches a level of tedium previously unknown, even when entering small amounts of data. Is that assumption correct? The test device was an Internet Tablet, with considerable more screen real estate than an iPhone, BlackBerry, or other mobile phone.

Someone enlighten me, please? While many may argue that I'm impaired in more ways than one, my eyes and their rods and cones work just fine, thank you.

After you respond with insightful validation of my assumptions, read our smartphone or netbook reviews.

Related posts:
Skype Reaches iPhone and iPod Touch at CTIA

Microsoft Predicting $200 Netbooks with Windows 7

Rumor Alert: April 30 Release Date for the Palm Pre