[gui-talk] Fwd: Article: Can an Android Make Your Mobile Phone Accessible? - AccessWorldR - May 2010

[Steve Pattison]

From 
AFB
ACCESSWORLD R
Technology and People Who Are Blind or Visually Impaired
May 2010 Issue
Volume 11
Number 2
Product Reviews
 
May 2010 Issue
Volume 11
Number 2
Product Reviews
Can an Android Make Your Mobile Phone Accessible?
Darren Burton
If you're like me and you watched countless hours of this spring's March
Madness NCAA college basketball tournament, you probably heard plenty of
promotions for the Droid cell phone. The Droid is one of several new phones
using Google's new Android operating system. If you have been wondering what
an android can do for you as far as cell phone accessibility, you've come to
the right place. Along with my fellow lab rats at AFB TECH, I've been
investigating a couple of phones with the Android operating system, and this
article will discuss the accessibility that is being developed for this new
line of cell phones and provide our initial thoughts on the line's progress.
The Phones
Google launched the Android operating system in 2008. Android is an
open-source operating system for cell phones in the smartphone category.
Android phones compete with many of the smartphones we have reviewed in
AccessWorld  that use the Blackberry, iPhone, Windows Mobile, or Symbian OS
operating systems.
In January 2010, Android had 7.1 percent of the U.S. smartphone market, and
its share has been rising steadily.
Several manufacturers are building Android-based smartphones, and they are
available from all U.S. carriers. Besides the Droid, which is manufactured
by Motorola and available from Verizon Wireless, we also looked at the Nexus
One, an unlocked smartphone from Google that can be used on AT&T and
T-Mobile networks. The focus of this article is the software, so I don't
want to spend a lot of time describing the hardware, but here are the
basics. Android-based smartphones all feature touch-screen interfaces with
virtual keyboards, and many also have physical QWERTY keyboards that slide
or flip out. They each have a track-ball or directional pad (D-pad) type
navigational control, as well as a volume toggle, headphone jack, and power
button. Some, but not all, also have physical send and end keys for handling
phone calls, something I will address later in this article.
The Droid phone showing icons on its touch screen interface.
Caption: The Droid Phone
The Droid phone showing icons on its touch screen interface and its
slide-out QWERTY keyboard
Caption: The Droid phone and its QWERTY keyboard The Nexus One has a
track-ball for navigation, but it does not have a physical QWERTY keyboard
or send and end keys. It is very similar in size and shape to the iPhone; in
fact, my iPhone case fits the Nexus One perfectly. The Droid is similar, but
a bit thicker because it has a slide-out QWERTY keyboard with a D-pad on the
right side of the keyboard, but it has no physical send or end keys. In
addition to all of the virtual buttons that can appear on the touch screen,
these phones also have four touch buttons on the touch screen that are
always there, and they are labeled "Back," "Menu," "Home," and "Search." The
Droid runs Android version 2.0 and the Nexus One runs version 2.1.
What About Accessibility?
For people with vision loss, the interesting work at Google is being done by
the Eyes-Free project, led by blind scientist T.V. Raman and his colleagues
Charles Chen and Svetoslav Ganov. Working to accommodate people with vision
loss, as well as sighted people in situations where they cannot look at
their phones, the Eyes-Free project began with a collection of Android
applications aimed at making it easier to interact with the phones
non-visually. Examples include the Talking Dialer, Talking Caller ID, and
Talking Compass applications (apps). Building on this, they announced the
TalkBack screen reader in October 2009 to provide spoken feedback when using
the various apps available on Android phones and at the Android Market. This
is enhanced by the SoundBack and KickBack apps that provide non-spoken
feedback, such as beeps and clicks, and haptic/vibratory feedback as you
interact with the phone.
You will
need sighted assistance to go to the menu and choose settings and then
accessibility to enable these apps, but they will then stay enabled as long
as you don't go back and disable them.
Because the Android Market is a growing source for a wide array of
third-party apps for these phones, the Eyes-Free team is also making it
possible for designers to make their apps compatible with Eyes-Free
functionality. They have resources available on the Google Resources page ,
and there is another page for developers .
Bringing it all together is the Eyes-Free Shell, which they are calling
Marvin, after the paranoid and depressed robot in Douglas Adams' novel The
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy . You can make Marvin your home screen and
make it your launching point for Eyes-Free apps. A video available on the
Google Resources page  notes that Marvin pulls together the various aspects
of Eyes-Free for a more consistent and well-integrated interface. These
accessibility features come at no extra cost, and they are available out of
the box on all phones running Android version
1.6 or
later.
How Does It Work?
With TalkBack, KickBack, and SoundBack enabled, you can move around the grid
layout of the home screen/desktop of your Android-based phone using the
track-ball or D-pad.
TalkBack will speak the names of the various items and applications, and
SoundBack will emit a ding sound when moving from item to item. You cannot
navigate to the touch buttons at the bottom of the screen that I mentioned
earlier; these must be touched to activate. KickBack provides a short
vibratory burst to indicate you have found the buttons, which also helps in
learning how to find them non-visually. If an app has been designed
properly, these features will allow a person with vision loss to use them
independently.
Marvin, the Eyes-Free Shell, allows you to use these features to more
efficiently use your Android phone. With Marvin's home screen up, you can
think of the touch screen as a 3 by 3 grid of controls, much like a dialing
grid on a standard phone.
You can move your finger around the screen and it will speak the action
under your finger. You then simply lift up and it activates that action.
However, you don't have to know exactly where the buttons are because
Eyes-Free employs what they call "relative positioning." Wherever you touch
the screen will be the 5 position, and then you can move relative from that
position to the other positions in the grid.
Moving from 5 in a northwestern direction up to the 1 position, you will
hear it say "signal strength," and if you lift your finger, it will tell you
how strong your connection is. The 2 position is for time and date and 3 is
for battery level. Although it certainly helps to begin as close to the
center of the screen as you can, the nice thing is you don't always have to
hit a precise position to begin.
I won't get into all of the other controls on Marvin's home screen, but the
6 position
is interesting. It is for location information, and Android uses Google Maps
along with cell towers and satellites to tell you your general location,
usually accurate to within a block.
The 8 position is for launching applications, and when you activate that
control, Marvin has a unique way of quickly launching the app you want.
Using what they call the "stroke dialer," you can type the first letter of
the app you want and then choose from a list of apps starting with that
letter. Here's how it works. Starting again near the middle of the screen
and moving in a northwestern direction toward the top left corner, you will
hear it say the letter A. Moving your finger in a circular clockwise
direction, you will hear B, C, D, all the way to the letter H. For I through
P, begin by moving straight up in a northern direction. For Q through X,
start by going in a northeastern direction to the top right. For Y, Z, a
series of punctuation marks, and the backspace key, start by moving in an
eastern direction. When you hear the first letter of the app you want, just
lift your finger and you can then use the track-ball or D-pad to navigate
and choose the app you want. For example, you could go to the letter C and
launch contacts and begin scrolling through your contacts.
Note: the punctuation marks were not spoken by TalkBack.
How Do You Dial a Phone Number?
Although most of us who use smartphones usually place calls from the
contacts list or the call log, we still occasionally have to dial a phone
number directly.
The
Talking Dialer app, which is integrated into Marvin, is activated by
touching the button labeled "Search" on the lower right corner of the
screen. The KickBack app gives vibrates to indicate you have found the
button, and you are now ready to enter the digits. Again, this app uses
"relative positioning," so wherever you place your finger is the 5, and the
rest of the dialing grid is positioned relative to that spot.
Let's say you want to dial an 800 number. Start by placing your finger in
the middle of the screen; slide down one position and lift your finger and
you will hear it speak the number 8 and an 8 is placed into the number you
are dialing.
SoundBack
emits a tick sound to indicate when you have passed into the area of the
screen for an 8. For the 0, you again place your finger in the middle of the
screen and this time move down two ticks and lift your finger to enter a 0.
When finished with all the digits, touch the Search button on the bottom
right corner and you will hear the digits you have entered. Touch it again
to place the call.
You shake the phone once to delete a character you have misdialed, and twice
to clear all digits. To end a call, you have to touch a virtual button that
appears on the screen about a third of the way up from the bottom. With
advice from T.V.
Raman of
Google's Eyes-Free project, I placed a stick-on dot on the back of the phone
to help me orient my fingers to the right spot. That also helps with finding
the correct place to swipe your finger to answer or ignore a call. One
drawback to the Talking Dialer is that it does not work to enter digits into
the interactive phone systems we often encounter, where you have to press 1
for customer service and 2 for sales, etc.
Thoughts from the Lab Rats
After a couple of solid weeks in and out of the lab with the Android phones,
we're not ready to tell you to ditch your current phone and run out to get
the nearest Android you can find. However, once we figured it all out, there
were certainly a lot of positives. If the progress we have seen in Android
accessibility over the last year continues, this may be a real force in
smartphone accessibility.
First of all, considering the high price we often have to pay for accessible
technology, it is certainly refreshing and encouraging to see that Google,
as Apple did with the iPhone, is creating this accessibility at no extra
cost. We found TalkBack's synthetic speech to be clear and easy to
understand. As my intern said, "This android might not be good with a light
saber, but it has a better voice than R2D2."
We also
found it to be very responsive to commands, without any annoying delays.
We used several of the apps that came with the phones and most of them
worked well.
It was easy to launch and use the contacts app to find a contact and make a
call, and with a little practice, we also got used to using the Talking
Dialer to make calls. Similarly, the Music, YouTube, and Facebook apps were
straightforward and accessible. However, in what could be a deal-breaker for
some of you, the Web browser and e-mail apps are not yet accessible. We also
found a couple of bugs along the way that will need to be worked out. On the
Nexus One, the Talking Caller ID app would often speak the ID of the
previous caller rather than the current caller. On both phones we looked at,
when pressing the power button to wake it up from its sleep state, it tells
you to hit the home button to wake it up, but you actually swipe your finger
from left to right across the screen.
The lack of available documentation, such as a user guide, quick start
guide, or tutorial did make it difficult for me to learn how to use
everything, and I have access to a couple of college intern lab rats to help
me out. I can see how the average person could have some trouble getting
squared away with an Android phone.
However,
the Eyes-Free team does have several videos available, and there is an
active Eyes-Free Google Groups discussion group where you can find help. See
the Resources section of this article to learn how to access the videos and
the group.
Which Phone Works Best with Eyes-Free?
It wouldn't do you much good for me to suggest one specific phone model
because the pace of change in the Android phone market is so fast that the
phone might be gone from the market by the time you read this. However, I
can give you some general information to help you make a choice. First, you
want to make sure the phone is running Android version 1.6 or later. Second,
you want to get a phone with a physical QWERTY keyboard, so I would not
recommend Google's Nexus One. The reason for this is that Android's virtual
QWERTY keyboards are not yet accessible, and a QWERTY keyboard is necessary
for nearly all tasks that require text input, such as text messaging,
sending tweets or Facebook updates, or using the interactive phone systems
we often encounter where you have to press 1 for customer service and 2 for
sales, etc. A physical QWERTY keyboard will also be necessary when browsing
and e-mailing are made accessible.
The stroke-dialing described for launching applications is fine for a letter
or two, but will never be efficient for typing larger amounts of text.
The tactile nature of QWERTY keyboards can also be a problem for some users,
as the keys can often be very small or very flat and difficult to
differentiate from one another. They also usually don't have easy-to-feel
nibs for orientation purposes.
You may try adding marks to the keys to help with orientation or, as it is
nearly impossible to add a raised mark on a slide-out keyboard, you might
try roughing up a key or two with a fingernail file. Although I have never
been overly comfortable with the QWERTY keyboard on a cell phone, I know
many of you are, and even I can get used to one with a little practice and
maybe a little modification.
The Bottom Line
At this point, the accessibility and usability of the Android phones have
not reached the levels of we have seen with other smartphones, such as the
iPhone or the Symbian, Windows Mobile, or Blackberry phones with their
respective screen readers.
However,
it does provide some real accessibility out of the box and at no extra cost.
Our
contacts at Google tell us they are committed to improving the accessibility
of their products, and the work on the accessibility of Android is not
complete.
Google's
Jonas Klink, who gave a presentation on Google's accessibility efforts at
this year's CSUN Conference on Technology and People with Disabilities, told
me that even though something might not work perfectly in the beginning, it
doesn't mean they are not working on it. If you recall, Google's famous
search engine page was not exactly perfect for screen readers in the
beginning, but it has now evolved into one of the most accessible and useful
tools I use on a daily basis.
Klink and Raman are looking for user feedback, and you can provide that
feedback in the Eyes-Free Google Group  or at Google's accessibility page .
If you have access to an Android phone belonging to a friend or relative, or
you just like to try out new technology, I do recommend you get your hands
on one and provide your feedback. You could play a role in making Web
browsing and e-mail accessible, or you could share your ideas for creating
an accessible virtual keyboard or user guide.
Resources
General Google accessibility page:
www.google.com/accessibility
Videos from TV Raman and Charles Chen on Eyes-Free Accessibility:
www.google.com/accessibility
Eyes-Free Google Group:
http://groups.google.com/group/eyes-free
Christopher Millsap discussing the Droid on Blind Cool Tech:
www.BlindCoolTech.com
Resource for app developers:
http://Eyes-Free.googlecode.com
This product evaluation was funded by the Teubert Foundation, Huntington,
WV.

Regards Steve
Email:  srp at internode.on.net
MSN Messenger:  internetuser383 at hotmail.com
Skype:  steve1963
Twitter:  steve9782