alt Hacker NewsPorting Android 16 to my blind mother's keypad phone
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AOSP dev here, really nice work!
About the keypad, normally key presses are reported to apps by the system as key events (pressed, released etc) and keycodes. There is a mapping between hardware keys and software key codes that can be overridden through kcm files.
More about this here: https://source.android.com/docs/core/interaction/input/keybo...
Great story and good write-up. Might have enjoyed a little more detail in places - so it would be more easily repeatable for someone else - but perhaps that would belong in a readme.
I guess this proves that android is still usefully more open than iOS.
So nice to read a write up like this. Not afraid to use AI tools, but still writing up the project personally from the perspective of the human running the show.
Interestingly back in 2007 Google demo'd Android on a Blackberry-like keypad phone https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FJHYqE0RDg
I'm confused. Why is the keyboard tied to a special app, and not just... A keyboard? Android supports hardware keyboards.
I think the trouble with GSIs is that they often don't have everything working. For OP: did you actually test that stuff works? things like phone calls, camera, mobile internet?
I believe the Telegram for Android client is open source. You might be able to submit a PR to fix the accessibility issue upstream.
Love it! Makes me wanna get a landfill android with physical keys and some amount of ram and get it working again for my grandparents.
> so i wrote one small app that does the keypad, the home screen and the keyboard.
Maybe that is worth open-sourcing.
Great work! Congratulations!
Good writeup, interesting how you got your "voice" into what was mostly an AI generated writeup.
>holding both volume keys turns talkback on and off, and android plays a sound when you do it. a very loud sound. WHY IS IT SO LOUD
The fun part about it is that even if you lower TalkBack's sound, enable the debug tool that just writes the text in a toast because listening to accessibility announcements all day long is a recipe to go mad, turning it on/off always give you the horribly loud TALKBACK ENABLED, all my colleagues know when one of us is doing accessibility work.
Someone unlock robo vaccums & older Android watches please
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This is lovely work. Building for older users taught me how much "obvious" UI isn't. Most of my users are 55+, and the bugs that mattered were never the clever ones: layouts breaking at large system font sizes, and people not finding an app because they typed the name the way it sounds. A physical keypad with a screen reader that actually works sounds like it solves a whole class of those problems at once. How does she handle text input, T9 or voice?
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Whew, rough :)
The whole "let's make an Android device for seniors/the blind/whoever and pin it on an ancient Android version/spec it really low but charge a premium" thing is unfortunately not new.
If you look at the Blindshell 2 and 3 you see plenty of this happening as well, not to mention way more expensive hardware like the BrailleSense Polaris which last time I checked ran on Android 5, scary "Mind updating right now please?" Google Play warnings and everything.
If it helps any, Talkback does have a set of keyboard commands it responds to, perhaps making your keypad buttons fire those means the implementation might be less brittle but given what you've already had to deal with maybe just not touching it ever again might be thebest thing at this point :)
Disclaimer: Actually blind Android user/developer