I had an HTC Dream when Android was a brand-new thing and the screen slid sideways to reveal a keyboard. Coming from Blackberry the key feel was not was good but the software was much more impressive. It even had a little trackball!
So sad keyboard (even better than keypad) android phones were pushed from the market by corporate decision makers.. Sony Ericsson's SK17 and Samsung's i927 were splendid devices, the latter served me many years (KitKat times..)
Now on an UniHertz Titan 2 which is ok, but the landscape slider phones were just that bit more practical imho..
Great story and good write-up. Might have enjoyed a little more detail in places - so it would be more easily repeatable for someone else - but perhaps that would belong in a readme.
I guess this proves that android is still usefully more open than iOS.
I think people are trying to use that as a sign that they aren't using AI to write it, however I imagine it's easy enough to ask the AI to not capitalize and use typos.
fair point, i do that only because i'm very used to it. i may introduce an option to auto-capitalize, and maybe different fonts to improve readability (and accessibility), especially for people with dyslexia
The missing punctuation at random times was infuriating. Never fun when you have to re-read a sentence because the word without punctuation is itself also a word.
where does the necessity for ease of parsing come from
no ones going to argue that the page should be rewritten in chinese spanish or hindi so that the information would be easier for those readers to parse
to assume that the reader needs punctuation or even proper splling in order to rcv the message is nthing more than an extra nicety for only an english reading crowd
I am deliberately avoiding punctuation, there, because adding it does not add any information that is not already present in the text in order to demonstrate the point: The punctuation is not necessary. The information was transmitted and recieved. We know it is recieved because it was 'harder' to parse, not 'impossible' to parse.
The whole "let's make an Android device for seniors/the blind/whoever and pin it on an ancient Android version/spec it really low but charge a premium" thing is unfortunately not new.
If you look at the Blindshell 2 and 3 you see plenty of this happening as well, not to mention way more expensive hardware like the BrailleSense Polaris which last time I checked ran on Android 5, scary "Mind updating right now please?" Google Play warnings and everything.
If it helps any, Talkback does have a set of keyboard commands it responds to, perhaps making your keypad buttons fire those means the implementation might be less brittle but given what you've already had to deal with maybe just not touching it ever again might be thebest thing at this point :)
So nice to read a write up like this. Not afraid to use AI tools, but still writing up the project personally from the perspective of the human running the show.
>holding both volume keys turns talkback on and off, and android plays a sound when you do it. a very loud sound. WHY IS IT SO LOUD
The fun part about it is that even if you lower TalkBack's sound, enable the debug tool that just writes the text in a toast because listening to accessibility announcements all day long is a recipe to go mad, turning it on/off always give you the horribly loud TALKBACK ENABLED, all my colleagues know when one of us is doing accessibility work.
because it's a 12 key pad, sorta like what you'd see on older phones with t9 layout. it would've been much easier if it was a blackberry-style qwerty keyboard. and the "d-pad" at the top has to move talkback's cursor
I think the trouble with GSIs is that they often don't have everything working. For OP: did you actually test that stuff works? things like phone calls, camera, mobile internet?
About the keypad, normally key presses are reported to apps by the system as key events (pressed, released etc) and keycodes. There is a mapping between hardware keys and software key codes that can be overridden through kcm files.
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[ 9.5 ms ] story [ 93.0 ms ] threadI remember some phones came with a keypad, but they disappeared quite quickly.
I spent hours fixing scripts and restarting servers at 3 am or on off-days from it. Server intervention times of seconds. Best device ever!
The keyboard was comfy, screen was good enough, and you could use your entire screen for the console because the keyboard was separate.
It also looked wicked.
These days with these pathetic media consumption devices if I need to do something I pull my laptop out.
Now on an UniHertz Titan 2 which is ok, but the landscape slider phones were just that bit more practical imho..
Which is based on customer reaction. Look how successful is blackberry phone after the iphone.
Android launched with a keyboard.
I guess this proves that android is still usefully more open than iOS.
How i thought ui should work and how blind users use ui was night and day had to do like 9 rounds of ui change with people over weeks.
It is! Relevant example from this week: https://sshhole.com/
no ones going to argue that the page should be rewritten in chinese spanish or hindi so that the information would be easier for those readers to parse
to assume that the reader needs punctuation or even proper splling in order to rcv the message is nthing more than an extra nicety for only an english reading crowd
I am deliberately avoiding punctuation, there, because adding it does not add any information that is not already present in the text in order to demonstrate the point: The punctuation is not necessary. The information was transmitted and recieved. We know it is recieved because it was 'harder' to parse, not 'impossible' to parse.
Is it nice to have? Maybe. Perhaps for some.
Necessary? Certainly not.
I'll draw inspiration from you and assume you don't need it spelled out.
Your spellings certainly make it a lot harder.
Maybe that is worth open-sourcing.
The whole "let's make an Android device for seniors/the blind/whoever and pin it on an ancient Android version/spec it really low but charge a premium" thing is unfortunately not new.
If you look at the Blindshell 2 and 3 you see plenty of this happening as well, not to mention way more expensive hardware like the BrailleSense Polaris which last time I checked ran on Android 5, scary "Mind updating right now please?" Google Play warnings and everything.
If it helps any, Talkback does have a set of keyboard commands it responds to, perhaps making your keypad buttons fire those means the implementation might be less brittle but given what you've already had to deal with maybe just not touching it ever again might be thebest thing at this point :)
Disclaimer: Actually blind Android user/developer
The reality is serving a niche market does not generate enough top line revenue to fund large teams to keep the product going at state of the art.
really cool to hear from someone who's actually affected by all of this though! and thanks for the talkback tip, i should look more into that
It is produced for other reasons.
The fun part about it is that even if you lower TalkBack's sound, enable the debug tool that just writes the text in a toast because listening to accessibility announcements all day long is a recipe to go mad, turning it on/off always give you the horribly loud TALKBACK ENABLED, all my colleagues know when one of us is doing accessibility work.
About the keypad, normally key presses are reported to apps by the system as key events (pressed, released etc) and keycodes. There is a mapping between hardware keys and software key codes that can be overridden through kcm files.
More about this here: https://source.android.com/docs/core/interaction/input/keybo...