Student helps develop touchscreen tablet app for the Blind

People of all ages are utilizing and enjoying the touchscreen tablets.  Whether you are keeping track of the household bills or keeping your child occupied playing games on it while at the grocery these tablets are an asset on any day for most everyone; everyone with their sight.

Thanks to technology, a senior from New Mexico State University and his two mentors, there is now a Braille writer for a touchscreen being developed.

Adam Duran, a visiting student at the Standford’s Army High-Performance Computing Research Center (AHPCRC) summer program, along with Adrian Lew and Sohan Dharmaraja thought of ways technology could aid the blind.  At first deciding to work on a Braille reader, it hit them they could go much further.

“The killer app was not a reader, but a writer,” Dharmaraja told Stanford Report.

The team realized that touchscreens had many different sides to them.  On one side they use touch, which is how the blind read and write already; on the other side they are flat and give the impression that it would be out of the question to traverse for someone with no sight.  The group knew blind users could feel the keys, but they had to figure out how the users would do this on a flat surface with no keys.

Realizing they could create a tablet that would know when and where the fingers were on the table, thus automatically placing the keyboard exactly where the user places their fingers – would be the answer.  The tablets would then adjust to the user and do it again and again every time the fingers were removed and replaced.

Dharmaraja told Stanford Report that touchscreens “can accommodate users whose fingers are small or large, those who type with fingers close together or far apart, even to allow a user to type on a tablet hanging around the neck with hands opposed as if playing a clarinet.”

There are other helpful actions these tablets could do, such as changing into different modes like a mathematical notation mode.