Touch-Screen Phone for the Blind
Readers of this blog should already recognize the name TV Raman, a research scientist from Google who is involved with such interesting projects as an accessible AJAX framework and Google Health.
Mr. Raman recently emerged in the media again, this time for his work on a touch-screen phone for blind people. The device has no buttons on its smooth surface, but a tweaked interface that makes use of such built-in features as GPS and a compass. The system is being considered to help elderly people with failing vision, who could possibly benefit from a phone that doesn’t require strenuous vision.
The linked article goes on to mention the challenges users with disabilities have adapting to new technologies. Screen-reader software is expensive and doesn’t guarantee improved navigation or orientation. Often, people with disabilities need to adapt in unique ways. Mr. Raman himself is an interesting test case:
Raman, who before joining Google in 2005 worked at Adobe Systems and as a researcher at IBM, is intimately familiar with accessibility problems, both personally and professionally. In 2006, he developed a version of Google’s search engine that gives a slight preference to web sites that work well with screen readers. The system had to test millions of web pages.
“You wouldn’t have found a single page that fully complied with the accessibility guidelines,” Raman said. Still, the system could detect which pages worked reasonably well with screen readers.
For his own use, he has built a highly customized system that allows him efficient access to much of what he needs on his PC and on the web, stripping out anything that could slow him down. For instance, the system goes directly to the article text on the news sites he reads regularly, bypassing navigational links and other features found on most web pages.
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