[Tektalkdiscussion] Stroke Dialer makes number dialing relative and blind-friendly

[John Gassman]

Hi,
I don't know if you've seen this already but just in case below is an 
article on using touch dialer for touchscreen cell phones. There's a video
if you click the link.

http://www.mobilecrunch.com/2009/04/06/stroke-dialer-makes-number-dialing-relative-and-blind-friendly/#more-11088 



If they can make this work using telephone touch screens, they should 
be able to make it work on commercial touch screens as well.

Stroke Dialer makes number dialing relative and blind-friendly

by
Greg Kumparak
  on April 6, 2009

It has only been a few months since Stevie Wonder was at CES to ask 
the phone industry to make the handsets more accessible to the blind, 
but it looks like
it's starting to catch on.

Dialing on a touchscreen can be a huge pain, even with full vision. 
Take eyesight out of the equation, and the lack of tactility makes 
things pretty much
unmanageable. Two Google engineers have banded together to form "
EyesFree
", a dev team devoted to "creating applications for Android that help 
change people's lives." That's a big promise to make, but they've 
already started
living up to it. Already having premiered a talking dialer, talking 
compass, and a text-to-speech library, they're now demonstrating 
"Stroke Dialer", which
removes the need to see the screen by making all key pad presses relative.

Confused? Think of it this way: you know a phone's layout. If you 
knew which key you were on, you could determine which direction you'd 
have to move your
finger to get to any other key. With Stroke Dialer, wherever you put 
your finger on the touchscreen becomes the location of the 5. Release 
the press, and
you've pressed 5. If you slide your finger in the direction of 
another number before releasing, however, you've pressed the relative 
key. Press down and
move up? That's a 2. Press down and move down? That's an 8.

Why not just use voice dialing? Accuracy, presumably. Voice 
recognition is getting better and better all the time, but it still 
tends to trip up an unfortunate
amount. Plus - sometimes it just feels good to actually dial a 
number, rather than tell creepy-robot-voice lady which number to dial for you.


                 John Gassman
mailto:johngassman at roadrunner.com
Recognition Of The Problem is 51% Of The Solution