Today is a great day and it is that Google has launched the virtual Braille keyboard for Android. Google's accessibility features on Android have improved a lot over time, and now even more so with the addition of a virtual Braille keyboard.
The company says it collaborated with braille developers to offer a unified writing experience across apps, to help people with visual impairments.
Google launches virtual Braille keyboard for Android
“Today, braille displays make writing accessible on most phones and computers through a physical braille keyboard. But it can take a long time to connect an external device, every time you want to type something quickly on your phone." Google wrote on his blog.
Google says that the typing experience on its virtual Braille keyboard will be almost the same as the physical Braille keyboard. Therefore, there will not be a significant learning curve for people who are used to writing Braille.
The keyboard uses a standard 6-key layout. Each key in the layout represents one of the six braille dots. These dots are used to form letters or symbols. The keyboard can be turned on or off just like you normally switch keyboards after you enable it.
Enable Braille keyboard on Android
To enable the braille keyboard on Android, go to your phone:
- Configuration
- Then we go to Accessibility
- Next we select TalkBack
- And click on Settings.
- Detailed instructions for setting up and configuring the TalkBack Braille keyboard are present here.
The keyboard supports various handy gestures. To be specific, swiping left removes a letter, swiping left with two fingers removes a word. You can add a space by swiping right, while swiping right changes to a new line and 2-finger swipe up sends the current text input.
The TalkBack Braille keyboard supports grade 1 and grade 2 braille and is now available on Android phones with the version 5.0 Lollipop or later. The language support is initially limited to English, but we could expect Google to add support for more languages very soon.
Like the TalkBack Braille keyboard and sound amplifier, we hope that Google will also apply its accessibility feature Live Caption to all compatible phones, instead of promoting it as an exclusive flagship feature.
I thank Google, and problem on my cell phone, it doesn't work for me.