Six

Context

I had watched blind people turn their phone round, rest six fingers on the glass and type messages without looking at it. It is called Braille Screen Input and it is built into every iPhone. I wanted to learn it, and found almost nothing to practise with.

The problem

Apple’s braille keyboard only exists while VoiceOver, the screen reader, is switched on, and VoiceOver changes how the whole phone responds to touch. For anyone who does not already use it, that setup is where learning stops. The one practice app I found spends three of its five welcome screens on it.

The courses that do exist mostly teach recognition: here are the dots, which letter is it? That is reading. Typing is a different skill, a shape held in six fingers at once, and it is learnt by doing it.

The approach

Six draws its own six keys, so there is nothing to set up. It asks how you will hold the phone, flat on a table or with the screen turned away, as Apple’s keyboard does. You rest three fingers of each hand on the glass and it places the keys under them. Every exercise is typed.

The lessons follow braille’s own structure rather than the alphabet. The first ten letters, a to j, are ten shapes. The next ten are the same shapes plus one dot, and five of the last six add two. Learn ten shapes and two rules and you have the alphabet. Words are drawn only from letters already learnt, the way a child’s first reading book works, so a learner is typing real words within minutes. Numbers, punctuation and sentences follow, and a placement test lets anyone who already knows some braille skip ahead.

Every dot has a note, so every letter is a chord, and the chord sounds like its shape: the top dots are high, the bottom dots low, and with headphones the left hand plays in the left ear and the right hand in the right. Get a letter wrong and Six plays the right chord first, to find by ear and feel. Only a second miss shows the dots.

The design decision that matters

The keyboard learns the learner. Each correct letter pulls the keys a little towards where the fingers actually landed, so the layout settles under one person’s hands instead of asking them to hit a stranger’s. Nothing announces this. After thirty correct letters, once, Six shows where the keyboard started and where those hands have taken it, plays all six notes, and says “Six has learnt where your fingers fall.”

That one moment carries the idea of the whole app: it has been paying attention to you.

Built for the people it is about

Each section has a speaker button that reads it aloud. Text meets the WCAG AAA contrast ratio of 7:1 in both themes, measured rather than judged by eye, and touch targets are at least 44 pixels. Because a web page cannot read the iPhone’s silent switch, each visit starts by checking you can hear it.

The web prototype has a limit I would rather state than hide. A web page cannot ask iOS to pass multi-finger touches through VoiceOver, so blind learners who rely on it cannot type on its keys. That limit is the main reason for the iPhone app.

The iPhone app

The native app is written in Swift and teaches exactly what the web version teaches: both read one curriculum file, and automated tests feed them the same random numbers and require identical lessons. What changes is everything the browser could not do. The keys take all six fingers through VoiceOver. Each finger has its own vibration, crisp for the top dots and soft for the bottom, so a chord can be felt as well as heard. Because the app’s sound ignores the silent switch, the sound check became a volume check that only steps in when the volume is low.

A new learner sees two steps before any lesson: how to hold the phone, then fitting the keys to their fingers. Before them comes a loading page with a mole. Moles find their way by touch, and this one holds up the Six logo while its six dots light in order with their numbers, 1 to 6, the first thing every braille learner needs. The picture of the mole was generated with a blank sign, and the app draws the real logo on it: image generators could not be trusted to count braille dots.

It is checked at the largest text sizes as well as the default, and the full VoiceOver review is part of the testing still to come.

Where it stands

The iPhone app has every lesson, the placement test, settings and a way to pass it on by QR code or message. It is in testing with friends now; next come TestFlight, testers who are blind or partially sighted and use VoiceOver every day, and then the App Store. After that: a final stage that moves the learner onto Apple’s own braille keyboard, and contracted braille, where common words such as ‘and’ and ‘the’ have chords of their own.

The web prototype stays free to try in any phone’s browser.