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- Country of residence: Palestine
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A Palestinian software developer has launched a new application for smartphones running the Android operating system, which is a keyboard aimed at the blind and visually impaired.
Developer Muhammad Mufid Al-Banna said yesterday, Monday, that the keyboard, called “SwiftBraille,” which targets the blind and visually impaired, provides them with the ability to write in Braille in Arabic and English on smart devices running Google’s Android system.
Al-Banna added that the SwiftBraille application - in its trial version - is the first available on the Google Play Store for free, and supports Arabic in its full form of letters and diacritics, as well as English. It allows the blind to print in Braille not only through letters, but also numbers and commonly used symbols, as well as Mathematical operations symbols.
The application allows quick switching between Arabic and English keyboards, and the application also provides five keyboards for each language, as each letter, number, symbol, word, or message is pronounced in both Arabic and English.
Al-Banna explained that the main idea of the application is not to simply press on the Braille dots, but rather to connect the dots together to form the letter, number, or symbol that they represent in the Braille language, as the user can connect the dots with either one or a maximum of two fingers at the same time.
The keyboard can also be customized, and the colors of the Braille dots can be changed or enlarged, which is a feature targeting the visually impaired who use the Braille language. There is a training screen - still under development - that allows the user to practice Braille in order to type faster later.
Al-Banna said that the application provides the ability to print even if the phone is in the vertical or horizontal position, and that it works in complete compatibility with the Google TalkBack application, which is a personal assistant application directed to the blind and integrated into the Android system.
Users of Android version 4.1 Jelly Bean or later can download the SwiftBraille keyboard app, which is no more than 1.9 MB in size, from the Google Play Store.
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