Learning the World

One flaw of the iPhone is its inaccessibility for visually impaired users, despite some built-in accessibility features for other users.

Now there’s light at the end of the tunnel: a few days ago Apple filed a patent for multi-touch in combination with features such as voice commands and speech recognition, facial recognition, gestures, fingerprint input, body temperature, heart rate, skin impedance, and pupil size.

With that range of input possibilities, accessibility on the iPhone (and on other devices) could be significantly improved. Also other visionary devices come into range, like the Charmr for diabetes management.

The Charmr was a great design study by Adaptive Path, although a touch screen is a problem for people with diabetes who are more likely to develop vision impairments and lose tactile sensitivity. Speech recognition is an obvious solution.