Portable Braille Keyboard (Braillex): A Wireless Tactile Input Device For Visually Impaired Users

Abstract

Smartphones, laptops, and tablets are quietly load bearing infrastructure for modern life – the way people study, work, communicate and navigate the world. Looking more closely however at how these devices work reveals a problem that mainstream technology conversations often ignore; that nearly all of these are designed, from the ground up, on the assumption that anyone using them can see. Touchscreens, menus, on-screen keyboards, notifications, and visual elements are not neutral design; they are design that meets the needs of most people but results in severe difficulty for a significant portion of people who are blind or severely visually impaired. Screen reader and voice input tools have partially met this need, but have not provided a suitable solution for the needs of visually impaired users to accurately perform efficient text entry in practice. For a student making notes in a lecture, or a worker crafting an email in an open-plan office, these are not minor issues — they are genuine barriers. In this paper we describe a small Braille-based BrailleX keyboard we designed and constructed as an experimental assistable input device. BrailleX has six physical buttons in the same configuration as the standard Braille cell layout. Combination of buttons create chording, which results in characters. The characters are transmitted through Bluetooth to a connected smartphone or computer. An audio feedback system tells the user what happens and has no visual indicator.