Porting Android 16 to my blind mother's keypad phone | Hacker News Reader

Porting Android 16 to my blind mother's keypad phone

z1x.us

175 pointsz1xus49 comments

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

yeah, it feels like profiting off of people's accessibility needs, which is pretty sad, but unfortunately, that's the world we live in ;'(

really cool to hear from someone who's actually affected by all of this though! and thanks for the talkback tip, i should look more into that

  > feels like profiting off of people's accessibility needs

It is really that, or maybe the market is so small that the margins must make up for it?

The market is so small there is no way any price they charge will “make up for” the investment they make.

It is produced for other reasons.

It’s a market size to staffing to cost thing. It’s not an evil thing.

The reality is serving a niche market does not generate enough top line revenue to fund large teams to keep the product going at state of the art.

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.

thank you! i initially wanted to release it somewhere or make a thread on xda, but never got my hands on it unfortuantely

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

If I remember correctly the first android phones were supposed to be keypad phones, and only the launch of the iPhone made them change course.

I remember some phones came with a keypad, but they disappeared quite quickly.

So sad keyboard (even better than keypad) android phones were pushed from the market by corporate decision makers.. Sony Ericsson's SK17 and Samsung's i927 were splendid devices, the latter served me many years (KitKat times..)

Now on an UniHertz Titan 2 which is ok, but the landscape slider phones were just that bit more practical imho..

>were pushed from the market by corporate decision makers

Which is based on customer reaction. Look how successful is blackberry phone after the iphone.

I had an HTC Dream when Android was a brand-new thing and the screen slid sideways to reveal a keyboard. Coming from Blackberry the key feel was not was good but the software was much more impressive. It even had a little trackball!

I was lucky enough to need a HTC Touch Pro 2 for work back in the day.

I spent hours fixing scripts and restarting servers at 3 am or on off-days from it. Server intervention times of seconds. Best device ever!

The keyboard was comfy, screen was good enough, and you could use your entire screen for the console because the keyboard was separate.

It also looked wicked.

These days with these pathetic media consumption devices if I need to do something I pull my laptop out.

This is correct.

Watching the first part with Sergey Brin is a punch in the gut man... Why did Android have to end like this?

God it makes me feel old to hear youngins not even be able to quote recent history correctly.

Android launched with a keyboard.

I'm confused. Why is the keyboard tied to a special app, and not just... A keyboard? Android supports hardware keyboards.

because it's a 12 key pad, sorta like what you'd see on older phones with t9 layout. it would've been much easier if it was a blackberry-style qwerty keyboard. and the "d-pad" at the top has to move talkback's cursor

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?

miraculously it all worked from the first boot, apart from bluetooth, which she doesn't use. it's using the stock vendor parition, so kapsys' drivers

I believe the Telegram for Android client is open source. You might be able to submit a PR to fix the accessibility issue upstream.

They occasionally dump the latest source but I don’t think they accept outside contributions.

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.

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.

Great work! Congratulations!

Someone unlock robo vaccums & older Android watches please

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?

How has the user feedback been? I ship a specific application for blind and low vision users.

How i thought ui should work and how blind users use ui was night and day had to do like 9 rounds of ui change with people over weeks.

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