The objective of the development team for this semester is to build a new improved version of the Talking-Points prototype from last year (build with standard Java on a OQO UMPC). One of the main goals was to choose a platform that would allow more (visually impaired) people to run and test our software on their devices. Our platform choice fell on Symbian S60, because it is a platform that has been around for some time and is therefore running on a big number of devices. In contrast to other new “hot” mobile platforms like Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android which are currently only available on one device, which are also very inaccessible due to their focus on touchscreen control. We also learned from our research and from talking to visually impaired people that Symbian is fairly popular in that part of the visually impaired community that is using special accessible mobile software.
More specifically we chose Python for S60 (aka PyS60) because it allows very easy rapid prototyping on a mobile device. Other mobile development environments often have a very steep learning curve and this is very simple in comparison.
The primary goal will be to first implement all the functionality of the current proof-of-concept prototype. These include:
- Bluetooth location detection
- Receiving location information through an RESTful HTTP API from our online location database
- Displaying location information through an audio output interface
In addition to that we are planning to implement the following new/changed features:
- Location detection through GPS
- Keypad navigation instead for voice commands (voice recognition on a mobile device is hard to get right)
Our design team is also actively working on new interesting features and coming up with a more usable interaction design.
If you have any feedback or suggestions concerning the implementation of Talking-Points using PyS6o, please let us know!