Inspiration
We wanted to focus on the community track and make technology accessible to everyone, so we decided to focus on a subset population that faces difficulties with technology. We came up with the idea of working with individuals that are visually impaired, as many modern technologies appear to be moving more towards vision-based products.
What it does
Allows users to type English in braille using one hand as an alternative method to the currently provided solutions.
How we built it
First, we brainstormed on how would we design a keyboard that will most benefit users with vision impaired. Then, we choose to develop the keyboard in Android using Android Studio as we are familiar with using Java. We built the keyboard based on the idea that a braille alphabet mostly composed from 3 rows of 2 dots. Our keyboard has 4 buttons that represent 4 combinations of [X O] [X X] [O X] [O O]. Clicking on our keyboard 3 times will create one alphabet. We choose to have only 4 keys because, without looking at the keyboard, it is easy for the users to locate the positions of the keys. Furthermore, we added gestures to swipe left, right, and down to delete, space-bar, and enter. Additionally, we learned that some characters are composed of 2 braille characters, so if typed braille can potentially be a prefix of 2-braille character, the keyboard wait for another input to compose the alphabet. In the end, we added voice feedback to the keyboard that it would speak every character and action made by the users.
Challenges we ran into
We came across previous applications that supported braille typing so we were going to change our idea. However, we realized that the current applications available only supported two-handed typing, so we decided to develop one which supported typing with one hand.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We made something that hopefully makes somebody’s life a little bit better.
What we learned
We began by learning the general difficulties individuals who are visually impaired face with technology, and researched about the current solutions. From the technical aspect, it was our first time coding an android system so we watched youtube videos and asked our peers for help.
What's next for Brailleboard
We went through several iterations of the final solution to make the input and feedback interface more intuitive, and also to resolve any issues we had. This suggests that the next step would be to test the solution with the right target users to get feedback with any issues from their perspective and make changes based on these responses. Further developments in Brailleboard could also include support different languages.
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