Photo credit by Nokia
We, the Sybmian development team now have a test device, a Nokia N95 running Symbian S60 3rd Edition, in our possession and we have started developing the prototype for this platform.
From talking to blind users we learn that pretty much every blind smartphone user has a screen reader software installed on their phone. Therefore we decided that a high priority for our Talking-Points system will be to play nice with common screen readers. Thanks to the generosity of Code Factory, a developer of mobile accessibility tools for the vision-impaired, we now have Mobile Speak running on the test device. We haven’t completely decided whether we should use the screen reading software for all the speech output, which would just mean graphically presenting the information on the display and letting the screen reader read it aloud, or creating our own speech output while making sure that the screen reader does not interfere in the meantime. If you have any input on this issue, please let us know!
Besides that we’ve divided up the programming duties and are ready to commence actual code development. An idea that we’ve had floating around since last year is to use the near-ubiquitous GPS receivers of modern phones to augment the Bluetooth beacon detection from our previous prototype. Some POIs (points of interest) would have GPS coordinates associated with them, in in place of or in addition to a Bluetooth MAC address. A phone running Talking-Points would then be able to send its current coordinates to the remote database, and get a list of nearby POIs. How close a POI would need to be to qualify as “nearby” has yet to be determined, but we expect it to be someting like a mile radius. After receiving this list, Talking-Points would periodically check if it has come within a certain distance of one of these POIs, and trigger a full query of the remote database if the user is near enough to one. This distance has to be yet determined as well. It would also check the total distance traveled from the point of the initial query, and get a new list of nearby POIs if the user has moved far enough. The specifics of this system will probably take shape over the coming weeks. In the meantime, we have a general idea of how it will function in the finished product.
Stay tuned to hear something about the first prototype test runs within the next couple of weeks,
Your Talking-Points Symbian Development Team