The increasing popularity of touchscreen phones has caused some problems for the visually impaired. However, the new BrailleTouch app hopes to fix that.
In an app coming to the market relatively soon for both iPhone and Android, Georgia Tech researchers have reduced the price of realistically typing Braille on a smartphone from $1700 plus the cost of the phone to essentially free. The $1700 is a basic figure which spoken by Post Doctorate Fellow Mario Romero of the School of Interactive Computing working on the project and mentioning how much a smartphone-connected Braille keyboard costs on average. What the app BrailleTouch will be doing is offering the same functionality with a set of simple gestures and 6 buttons on-screen that allow for accurate and simple typing of Braille characters.