Wireless Smartphone Keyboard for Visually Challenged Users

Abstract

A Smartphone is a combination of a cell phone, a personal digital assistant (PDA), a media player, a GPS navigation unit and much more. To a blind and visually impaired (BVI) user, a Smartphone can assist and help connect with our modern day cyber social world. The only inconvenience to the BVI user is its user interface, which is a touch screen display. In this project, an economical user-friendly compact text-input device for a BVI Smartphone user is developed. This device is designed for daily use and it supports Braille text. The device is connected to the smart phone by Bluetooth interface. A Smartphone app pairs the phone with the device and switches the default keyboard service to use the device keyboard. The Smartphone operating system runs the screen reader when the keyboard is in use, giving real time audio feedback to the user. Thus, a setup for nearly seamless text input is provided to the BVI user. A low-cost Arduino based prototype has been developed as a proof of concept. As part of the future work, the prototype keyboard will be evaluated by BVI users and the results will be compared with other existing text input methods for BVI users.