[SÉNS] Mobile Phone Concept for People with Visual Impairment Including Complete Blindness

Mobiles have become a part of our. It is as if life won’t move a step ahead without mobile phones. Now just imagine if you could not clearly see the digits and alphabets on your mobile, hard to even imagine right? Many visually impaired people have the ability to recognize things like light intensity colors. Takumi Yoshida gives the basic phone status to such people through color illumination and identifiable keypad, called SÉNS. With the help of glow of color they will be able to see the tiny texts on screen to at least some extent. The enlightenment is positioned on the sides as the sides are the ones that are exposed when the phone is on a flat surface.

In order to improve audio interactions between the user and the phone, SÉNS combines touch sensors and regular mechanical keys to provide real-time audio feedbacks. What this means is that when a user touches a key, the phone tells him what key has been touched without actually registering it as an input. The user may hover across the keys to consecutively gain feedbacks on which key they are touching.

Once the user is sure his finger is on the correct key, he then can press the key just like on any other standard phones. Once a key is pressed, another ‘click’ sound is fed back to confirm the input. This system is essentially just an audio version of what people without sight problems always utilizes; visual indications. This provides more efficient interactions and reduces the chance of making wrong inputs compared to current products used by people with visual impairment as they only provide audio feedbacks after key inputs are registered.

One of the biggest issues with ‘talking’ phones is that the sound interaction can be heard by other people nearby. Using a headset wired or wireless (if Bluetooth is available) can solve the problem, however having a headset integrated to the main phone can offer a number of advantages.