Update To Android Access: TalkBack
Smart phones tend to be short on physical buttons --- even
devices like the G1 or MotoRola Droid have very few buttons when the
physical keyboard is not open. This provides interesting
challenges when designing an efficient eyes-free interface ---
especially given the old maxim Speech is silvern, but silence
is golden!.Said differently, once you have built a system
that talks back, the first thing you want to build is an
efficient means of silencing spoken feedback.
Early versions of TalkBack on Android skimmed by without a
stop speech button --- you basically moved from one activity to
another,and the speech produced by the new activity effectively
stopped ongoing spoken output. However, as we make more and more
applications work seamlessly with our Access APIs, it's always
been clear to us that we need a global stop speech
gesture! Notice that I said gesture --- not
key --- stopping speech is a critical function that we'd
like to enable without having to pull out the physical keyboard,
and something we'd like to have devices without a physical
keyboard.
In the spirit of the dual to every access challenge is an opportunity to
innovate, we recently launched a new experimental TalkBack
feature on devices running Android 2.0. Devices on the Android
2.0 platform have a proximity sensor on the top front
left corner of the phone --- this is typically used to lock the
screen when you're holding the phone up to your ear when on a
phone call. As the name implies, the proximity
sensorfires when you get close to it --- you can activate it
by waving your hand close to the top left corner of the phone. As
an experimental feature, we have configured the latest version of
TalkBack to silence ongoing speech if you wave your hand in
front of the proximity sensor.
Note that this is a new, experimental feature --- it's
something that we welcome feedback on our public Eyes-Free Google
Group. We'd like to know if you accidentally activate
stop speechbecause of this new feature. In having used
it for a few weeks, I find that I am not triggering it
accidentally --- but that might well be a function of how I hold
the phone.
What Devices Does This Available On?
Note that at the time of writing, the devices that have a
proximity sensor that I have used this on include:
- MotoRola Droid from Verizon
- Google NexusOne
Note that the G1 and other older Android devices did not have
a proximity sensor.
