DESIGNING A MOBILE EYES-FREE SOFT KEYBOARD FOR VISUALLY IMPAIRED IN ANDROID

Typing is the essence of mobile communication and connectivity. Arguably, today’s technologies support mobile text input poorly, though this is the case for everyone, but it is particularly relevant to the visually impaired. The keyboard is specially designed to provide easy typing technology for the visually impaired. There are total 8 logical sensing areas (as Braille language uses cells to denote a character) that are used for acquiring the characters. The whole keyboard works based on Braille system. The words that are typed are recognized by searching in database dictionary and also checked whether the word is valid or not. In this keyboard design, the areas (or cells) are aligned according to the Braille language. The main advantage of this project is that the visually impaired do not need any training since most of them are already specialized in Braille language, barring some initial familiarity with keyboard