Summary of an Article
Caleb Southern, James Clawson, Brian Frey, Gregory Abowd, and Mario Romero. 2012. An evaluation of BrailleTouch: mobile touchscreen text entry for the visually impaired. In Proceedings of the 14th international conference on Human-computer interaction with mobile devices and services (MobileHCI ’12). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 317-326. DOI=http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2371574.2371623
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2371623&CFID=765868305&CFTOKEN=95670988
This paper investigates the development and use of a touch keyboard called BrailleTouch that is intended to be used by people who are visually impaired as an affordable alternative to other Braille keyboards. For this study, 11 participants used three different methods, one tables, one smartphone, and one traditional Braille typing device, to investigate the speed and accuracy with which participants were able to type certain phrases in 20 minute periods. Similar to other Braille keyboards, the device is held facing away from the user and their pointer, ring, and middle fingers serve as the means with which they type the Braille letters. The major finding of this research revolves around the participants ability to adapt to the touchscreen and efficiently and accurately type. The paper notes that it only took roughly half an hour for participants to adapt to the touchscreen, indicating that it can be easily adopted by many people who are visually impaired. The major contribution of this study is the creation of an affordable technology for people who are visually impaired and would otherwise not have access to Braille keyboards.
I found this paper extremely interesting because I had never thought about how useful a mobile app that acts as a Braille keyboard could be for people who are visually impaired. I appreciated that there is a focus on creating an affordable technology for people, especially considering how expensive other technologies are. The main question that I am left with is what do you do with the information you type? How is it read back to you or sent to another person?
My Day
It has certainly been a long day. Its midnight and I am just finishing things up.
At the start of the day we went over ShareLaTex again and went into more detail, especially regarding tables. I thought this was very useful because I have only just started working with ShareLaTex and any practice using it is helpful.
Anna then talked to us about need assessment and qualitative analysis. I thought her talk was very informative and she was very clear in her explanations. It was also helpful when James jumped in and helped her out by giving us some examples to work with. I learned that qualitative analysis is useful when conducting interviews and trying to understand what people are looking for and trying to figure out some services you can provide for them. When discussing needs assessment I think the most important thing that was stressed was that you need to know what people want and need. You may think you know, but you’re always better off asking and listening. When we touched on interviews I have bolded in my notes the importance of recording the interview. That is kind of self-explanatory in my opinion.
Next up Ben talked to us about related work briefly before moving on to help us with Arduino. Arduino was super cool to use because it was so satisfying to see things work. I worked with Meagan today because my USB ports will fry the LilyPad, but I think that working with a partner has been very beneficial for me. It was cool working on getting things to light up and playing the Harry Potter tune. After about five minutes I did feel like crying because the sound was driving me crazy, but I did not so that’s good. When we had to try and find our own tune to work with I was a little frustrated. Luckily, Meagan found Eye of the Tiger so we used that.
Learning about the press release and videos came up next. I am not quite sure that I did my press release or video correctly, but I did give it my best shot. I understand the importance of the press releases and I hope that with practice I will get much better as writing them. When we wrapped that up, it was time for Fernando to tell us about his project. His project is on Remote Asynchronous Participatory Design. The population he is working with is people who have AIDS. I thought that is presentation was very interesting, especially when he discussed how difficult it has been to get in contact with this community.
here is a link to my notes form today https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kcVCJ3IwVCxL9dLR2xkKlugRlhKc-Ate-JM5STI2VMQ/edit?usp=sharing
(I tried making this a link but it won’t cooperate and I’m tired so I give up)
After that, I went back to my room and finished up my CITI and RCR training. I stopped quickly for dinner and then wrote up my summary. I looked at a paper by James what was about using a smartphone to type in Braille. I thought it was super interesting because that is something I never would have thought of. I personally think that technology has a lot of potential to improve many people’s lives.
Once I finished that, Meagan and I began working on our press release around 8. We had a very difficult time trying to create our video since neither of us had software previously installed. After a lot of frustration we finished our video and press release. I am not sure that we exactly did it correctly, but we tried and there will always be more chances to try again and improve our future press releases.
Side note: I am still a little confused on how Mendeley and ShareLaTex interact and how you can use them to produce different citation styles. I know we went over it, but I think practicing it once more would be very helpful.
Since it’s three hours past my bed time I am going to turn in. I’ll check in tomorrow!