H-Slate: A Hybrid Braille Slate Soft Keyboard for Touchscreen Devices

Touchscreens and touch input enabled interfaces are becoming more prevalent across electronic devices. They have already become the dominant input interface among mobile phones and tablets. Nowadays, even personal computers and laptops with touch enabled displays are being introduced more frequently to the market. The use of these devices becomes a demanding interaction challenge for the visually impaired because of the lack of tactile cues in their input surface. This is especially challenging to visually impaired elders who find it difficult to adapt to the accessibility technologies currently available for mobile devices. In this work we present H-Slate, our working prototype of a Braille slate soft keyboard that leverages the user's previous Braille writing experience and extends the Braille text input to all the applications and features in the device.