Don't take this the wrong way, but it's obvious from this comment that you've never spent any time working with a blind person on an interface. This idea that a blind person would need tactile feedback comes from a sighted person imagining what it would like to be blind, not the experience of actual blind people with buttons vs touchscreens.
That's unfortunate, but I don't think the appeals of the iPhone are really that applicable to blind persons for reasons like this. A touch interface isn't going to work very well without visual feedback, even if the mentioned issues are fixed; it would be better to search for a device more well-suited.
A lot of modern designs have flat controls with no tactile cues that renders them unusable for the blind. Being able to connect with an app using VoiceOver makes the device accessible.
Anything which is not tactile is bad if you ask me. That means capacitive buttons, touch screens etc. Even Star Trek shot themselves in an episode when a blind person had to use a panel:
If it's designed for blind people, I don't think visually signaling its function is necessarily a great option (though to be fair, it would at least allow sighted people to point out the device to their blind friends).
I have no real knowledge, but I imagine that gesture interfaces would be massively worse than keyboard for visually impaired because the lack of tactile feedback.
Perhaps a capacitive touch screen with certain subtle audio and haptic feedback?
It seems like the mechanical approach current Braille devices use might've jumped the shark, and I wonder if the blind world doesn't need a system that's more easy to do in today's world.
> The few blind people I've been acquainted with have all seemed to prefer screenreaders to braille displays. It's not hard to see why. You need to move one hand off the keyboard to read braille (keep in mind that blind users are almost invariably keyboard-centric users).
Ergonomics/UX factors, as appealing of an explanation as they make, may not be the main reason; the fact that the vast majority of the blind don't read Braille may be a bigger factor (Braille literacy among the blind seems to be about 10% in the US.)
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