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Would morse code be a suitable alternative to screen readers on smartphones? (self.Blind)
submitted by oppai_suika
I have been thinking about using the vibration motor on a smartphone to output morse code, as a silent alternative to a screen reader.
However, morse code is woefully slow to read- even a super proficient reader would struggle to read 25 words per minute. This makes it totally unsuitable for reading long articles and books, obviously.
The thing is, lots of the text on the internet is naturally short. For example- comments, titles, captions etc. would all be possible to read with morse code.
We could navigate a phone display by feeling our way around the screen and long pressing on things to "read" (in morse code) an explanation of. For example, holding down on the back button will read 'back' in morse code by vibrating the phone. If we actually do want to go back, we just do a single click there. Similarly, holding down on a Reddit comment will read the comment in morse code. Muscle memory should kick in after a while as we remember where certain elements exist.
Of course, this can't beat a screen reader for longer texts. But I think it would be a nice way to navigate around a phone, and would like to hear your thoughts on my concept.
I'm a software developer and have made Android applications before. If it is something that could be useful to the blind I would love to try and create it.
However, morse code is woefully slow to read- even a super proficient reader would struggle to read 25 words per minute. This makes it totally unsuitable for reading long articles and books, obviously.
The thing is, lots of the text on the internet is naturally short. For example- comments, titles, captions etc. would all be possible to read with morse code.
We could navigate a phone display by feeling our way around the screen and long pressing on things to "read" (in morse code) an explanation of. For example, holding down on the back button will read 'back' in morse code by vibrating the phone. If we actually do want to go back, we just do a single click there. Similarly, holding down on a Reddit comment will read the comment in morse code. Muscle memory should kick in after a while as we remember where certain elements exist.
Of course, this can't beat a screen reader for longer texts. But I think it would be a nice way to navigate around a phone, and would like to hear your thoughts on my concept.
I'm a software developer and have made Android applications before. If it is something that could be useful to the blind I would love to try and create it.
itisisidneyfeldman 6 points 5y ago
The functionality you are proposing is already possible with a combination of VoiceOver or TalkBack and various types of refreshable braille displays, all of which are currently in wide use.
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I think it would also be unrealistic to expect blind people to learn two tactile reading modalities. If a person learns one, it will likely be braille. Morse code is no longer widely known; braille is standardized as the accessible tactile text in education and public signage. Braille is also much faster to read, with readers sweeping across words almost holistically, much like sighted people's visual systems parse text into whole words. Morse code is a strictly serial temporal code. The result is, as you said, Morse reading speeds of $1; that is an order of magnitude slower than common braille reading speeds, $1. Speeded spoken language has similar rates of a couple hundred wpm.
$1
$1
$1
$1
$1
I think it would also be unrealistic to expect blind people to learn two tactile reading modalities. If a person learns one, it will likely be braille. Morse code is no longer widely known; braille is standardized as the accessible tactile text in education and public signage. Braille is also much faster to read, with readers sweeping across words almost holistically, much like sighted people's visual systems parse text into whole words. Morse code is a strictly serial temporal code. The result is, as you said, Morse reading speeds of $1; that is an order of magnitude slower than common braille reading speeds, $1. Speeded spoken language has similar rates of a couple hundred wpm.
oppai_suika [OP] 1 points 5y ago
Those are some good points, thank you for the feedback. My intention was not to replace those existing technologies, but simply to supliment them.
If a blind person was to use a phone in the regular fashion, holding it in one hand and navigating with their thumb- it is not possible at the moment (as far as I'm aware). You would have to use a sound source (speaker, earbuds) or an external device (braille display), like you said.
I wanted to use morse code more as a method of navigation, than an actual language to read in.
If a blind person was to use a phone in the regular fashion, holding it in one hand and navigating with their thumb- it is not possible at the moment (as far as I'm aware). You would have to use a sound source (speaker, earbuds) or an external device (braille display), like you said.
I wanted to use morse code more as a method of navigation, than an actual language to read in.
itisisidneyfeldman 4 points 5y ago
> If a blind person was to use a phone in the regular fashion, holding it in one hand and navigating with their thumb- it is not possible at the moment
If you mean purely tactile Morse feedback without a braille display or any audio, yes, currently it's just a vibrotactile "bump" when the finger encounters a target area. The question is what extra utility this would offer, given the reasons u/AllHarlowsEve mentioned in this thread that a combo of braille display and/or VoiceOver is richer, faster, and as externally quiet as you need it to be. If you could code up an extension to that OS behavior where each "bump" becomes a morse code character string, it might interest some users. Conceivably deaf-blind users could find utility in something like a $1, since VoiceOver is unavailable to people who can't her it. You would still have to make the case that the impoverished information stream is worth encoding in the tactile feedback. And because accessible design has a way of ultimately benefiting everyone, busy sighted phone users might like having more granular control over tactile feedback.
Apologies if this is wrong, but it sounds like you haven't had a chance to spend a lot of time with a skilled blind person operating a smartphone. Try to do so! As a sighted person working in this field I initially thought that smartphones, lacking tactile keyboard surfaces, would be terrible for accessibility. From watching their adoption, I saw that my assumption was wrong as hell. The iOS and Android mobile ecosystems have hugely improved blind people's access to the firehose of online information, and it's been remarkable to see just how smartphones, earbuds, and/or braille displays go hand in hand. So, try to observe firsthand, including by playing with your own phone's accessibility features, and really suss out (1) what morse feedback adds to the current suite of OS tools, and (2) whether that added value is something the community actually wants.
If you mean purely tactile Morse feedback without a braille display or any audio, yes, currently it's just a vibrotactile "bump" when the finger encounters a target area. The question is what extra utility this would offer, given the reasons u/AllHarlowsEve mentioned in this thread that a combo of braille display and/or VoiceOver is richer, faster, and as externally quiet as you need it to be. If you could code up an extension to that OS behavior where each "bump" becomes a morse code character string, it might interest some users. Conceivably deaf-blind users could find utility in something like a $1, since VoiceOver is unavailable to people who can't her it. You would still have to make the case that the impoverished information stream is worth encoding in the tactile feedback. And because accessible design has a way of ultimately benefiting everyone, busy sighted phone users might like having more granular control over tactile feedback.
Apologies if this is wrong, but it sounds like you haven't had a chance to spend a lot of time with a skilled blind person operating a smartphone. Try to do so! As a sighted person working in this field I initially thought that smartphones, lacking tactile keyboard surfaces, would be terrible for accessibility. From watching their adoption, I saw that my assumption was wrong as hell. The iOS and Android mobile ecosystems have hugely improved blind people's access to the firehose of online information, and it's been remarkable to see just how smartphones, earbuds, and/or braille displays go hand in hand. So, try to observe firsthand, including by playing with your own phone's accessibility features, and really suss out (1) what morse feedback adds to the current suite of OS tools, and (2) whether that added value is something the community actually wants.
oppai_suika [OP] 2 points 5y ago
Thank you, and you are correct in your assumption. I have not had the chance to spend any time with a blind person operating a smartphone. It seems I have a lot of learning to do on the topic- thank you for the insight and I'll be sure to refer back to your comment in the future. Thanks! :)
AllHarlowsEve 3 points 5y ago
I think you posted about this before.
The main issue is speed. For us blind folks, it'd be the visual equivalent of making the screen show only one letter at a time and with less control, as moving cursors would restart it or change what it's reading.
Almost all blind people that care about their speech being heard have picked up something, whether basic earbuds, bluetooth headsets, or any of the braille displays, watches, and the like.
It's fine in theory, but realistically, it'd require learning a whole new alphabet and steady fingers to keep the cursor from moving.
In return for that, they would get something a tenth as fast as a screen reader, if not less, that isn't as intuitive for the human brain.
The main issue is speed. For us blind folks, it'd be the visual equivalent of making the screen show only one letter at a time and with less control, as moving cursors would restart it or change what it's reading.
Almost all blind people that care about their speech being heard have picked up something, whether basic earbuds, bluetooth headsets, or any of the braille displays, watches, and the like.
It's fine in theory, but realistically, it'd require learning a whole new alphabet and steady fingers to keep the cursor from moving.
In return for that, they would get something a tenth as fast as a screen reader, if not less, that isn't as intuitive for the human brain.
oppai_suika [OP] 1 points 5y ago
Thank you for your response. I've never posted on this sub before, so it might have been someone else with the same idea as me. Apologies for the repost, in that case.
There is no cursor on a smartphone, and the buttons on the screen are all pretty large so that our fat fingers can click them easily. Often, I don't even look at the buttons since I can remember where my thumb should go to click them. For a blind person, the use of vibration and morse code would just be as a confirmation that you're clicking the right button. It wouldn't be used for any kind of extended reading.
There is no cursor on a smartphone, and the buttons on the screen are all pretty large so that our fat fingers can click them easily. Often, I don't even look at the buttons since I can remember where my thumb should go to click them. For a blind person, the use of vibration and morse code would just be as a confirmation that you're clicking the right button. It wouldn't be used for any kind of extended reading.
Marconius 5 points 5y ago
You really need to do your research on this topic and observe us using our smartphones. Screen readers give us a cursor in the interface that we manipulate using a series of swipes and gestures. This cursor lands on interactive elements and all things placed within the tab order on a webpage or within apps or the OS itself. We rarely if ever use a phone with a finger hunting method that you are assuming; this is generally only used when a UX is poorly designed without accessibility in mind and we have to hunt for a button out of the tab order or stuck in a cursor trap due to poor UI. Most of us have our screen readers sped up drastically for quick and concise comprehension which Morse would never be able to equal without years and years of practice and immersion, and even then would never match the comprehension speed of someone listening via earbuds or using a braille display.
Every screen reader already has vibration/haptic feedback built in so the device makes slight vibrations when landing on different parts of a UI. Android even annoyingly goes as far as having multiple odd sounds to help create an aural index of elements when navigating the interface.
Every screen reader already has vibration/haptic feedback built in so the device makes slight vibrations when landing on different parts of a UI. Android even annoyingly goes as far as having multiple odd sounds to help create an aural index of elements when navigating the interface.
bradley22 2 points 5y ago
This idea would make things so much slower. If you see a blind person using Voiceover or any screen reader you'll see that most of us will have it quite fast and will be used to that speed. As for holding your finger on a comment and having it read as vibrations, it would be a lot faster to have it read by the screen reader. If we want the phone to be quieter, we can always turn the phone down using the volume buttons.
ENTJ351 1 points 4y ago
Haha!! entertaining idea. I don't know morse co^e, and most do not. It seems inefficient and impractical. I think I can see me using it as a game like, to challenge your brinlet's see if I can do this. This is fun. However for regular use, I would want something a little more effective.
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