I am super excited to see that Google has developed a new edition to their talk back keyboard for Android that will include support for a braille keyboard. This is super exciting news for anyone who suffers from vision loss as this new keyboard will be much more normal to devices they regularly use.
It seems like this won't be too hard to get set up at all either. You just need to enable a few settings in your accessibility settings and then it will become a new keyboard for you to use. As for using it, it looks like Google has put in a lot of work to make it feel normal to braille users.
Our team collaborated with braille developers and users throughout the development of this feature, so it’ll be familiar to anyone who has typed using braille before. It uses a standard 6-key layout and each key represents one of 6 braille dots which, when tapped, make any letter or symbol. To type an “A” you would press dot 1 and to type a “B,” dots 1 and 2 together.
If you're ready to test it out then make sure all of your apps are updated. It should begin rolling out to all devices supporting Android 5 today so it may even be ready for you now. To set it up you can follow this support guide from Google:
https://support.google.com/accessibility/android/answer/9728765
In case you're not familiar, my brother Jeff is totally blind. He's also obsessed with new technology and will often buy devices in hopes of being able to learn to use them. Interfacing with these devices has always been an issue for him though.
We started back with Windows laptops and I'd be attempting to teach him the traditional keyboard and how to type on it. That never panned out. We've purchased nearly all of the editions of DragonSpeak in hopes he'd be able to use those software suites to be able to join the online community via just using his voice. He's never been able to successfully perform many operations outside of email with those.
In more recent years we've had small success with TalkBack but his biggest help is the voice assistants that come from Google or Amazon. These have enabled him to talk with normal language to get information he'd have to rely on others for.
When I read Google's announcement about this keyboard I immediately called him. He uses a traditional braille keyboard to store notes that can be read back to him and has always wanted to be able to do these things with a regular cellphone. He was very excited to hear about this and is looking forward to testing it out.
I've promised him I'd bring him an old phone of mine that we could set up to start playing with. I'm very excited to see him get to try this out but don't know when I'll get to work with him on using it. Regardless I'm definitely looking forward to it!
