Arabic Braille Touch Keyboard for Android Users

As smart phones appeared with their elegant, easy and exciting touch functionality, the use of touch screen devices has been spreading very fast. Beside the previous advantages, smart phones addresses some new challenges for people with disabilities. Most of visually impaired people don't prefer using touch-screen devices, as these lack the tactile feedback and are visually demanding. However, there have been some solutions to come over these problems, but they were not enough. Some of these solutions is to connect a special equipment to a smart phone to allow the visually impaired user to enter the required input. Other applications help visually impaired people to use the smart phones and read whatever on the screen by hovering their finger tips on the text. Visually impaired people who use smart phones have to memorize QWERTY keyboard which have a large number of targets with small locations specified for each target which will lead to a high proportion of error occurrence. In this paper, the authors propose ABTKA- Arabic Braille Touch Keyboard for Android Users. This application is the first application for Arabic language that uses Braille language for visually impaired who are using smart phones or intended to do so. ABTKA facilitates text-entry functionality by supporting Braille writing on touch screens. The used approach in the proposed system can be easily adapted to other languages. The main advantages of the used approach are that it does not need any extra equipment to be connected to the smart phone; it is dynamic (no fixed positions for the touch points), simple to use, one entry for each character, supported by voice and respond promptly to the input. ABTKA involves various algorithms to achieve its objectives. It starts with entering the user standard locations of finger tips, then the user can enter any Braille character which has to be reindexed to be in the same order of Perkins Brailler's buttons. Any inserted character is converted to Arabic character. Any converted character will have a voice feedback. Words and full sentences will also have voice feedback. ABTKA has been tested by various visually impaired people and proved that it is easy to learn and simple to use.