3GWeek - Asia’s Mobile News

Takumi Yoshida has made something superb. His creation-which won third prize winner of Design & Technology Enterprise Award 2008 awarded by Loughborough University Enterprise Office-is intended to help people with visual impairment (or even complete blindness) to comfortably using phone.

The Wii-remote-like concept phone was developed through a series of iterative user research, interviews, observations and testing with a group of young people with visual impairment from RNIB college, including complete blindness. Each phone is signed by dimple. Nevertheless, the phone still has more homework to be accomplished.

Cited from the site:

It turned out that increasing the spacing between each key can also cause confusion. While this improves key recognition, it only informs the user of whether the location he is touching is a key or not and does not inform WHICH key it is.

Anyway, here is how the phone can work (and help people with visual impairment):

• User touches a key
• Phone tells him what key has been touched without actually registering it as an input
• User may hover across the keys to consecutively gain feedback on which key they are touching
• Once the user is sure his finger is on the correct key, he then can press the key just like on any other standard phones
• Another ‘click’ sound is fed back to confirm the input
• System is essentially just an audio version of what people without sight problems always utilize; visual indications

This method is claimed to be effective, as it provides more effecient interactions and reduces the chance of making wrong inputs compared to current products used by people with visual impairment as they only provide audio feedbacks after key inputs are registered.

The maker-Takumi Yoshida-is 23 years old Japanese guy that studied Industrial Design and Technology (BSc) at Loughborough University, UK. He was born in Australia and fluent in both English and Japanese.

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