Porting Android 16 to my blind mother's keypad phone
75 points by z1xus 5 days ago | 20 comments
e12e 2 hours ago
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.
replyI guess this proves that android is still usefully more open than iOS.
lindskogen 12 minutes ago
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.
replyjrmg 32 minutes ago
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.
replyhaunter 4 hours ago
Interestingly back in 2007 Google demo'd Android on a Blackberry-like keypad phone https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FJHYqE0RDg
replyNordStreamYacht 3 hours ago
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.
replyI remember some phones came with a keypad, but they disappeared quite quickly.
literalAardvark 2 hours ago
I was lucky enough to need a HTC Touch Pro 2 for work back in the day.
replyI 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.
maxloh 52 minutes ago
> so i wrote one small app that does the keypad, the home screen and the keyboard.
replyMaybe that is worth open-sourcing.
margalabargala 2 hours ago
Ugh. The lack of capitalization turns this into an unreadable wall of text. What a terrible trend to jump on.
replyz1xus 56 minutes ago
fair point, i do that only because i'm very used to it. i may introduce an option to auto-capitalize, and maybe different fonts to improve readability (and accessibility), especially for people with dyslexia
replymargalabargala 12 minutes ago
If there was a toggle at the top to do so, I would hit it and have a much easier time reading your post :)
replyrationalist 2 hours ago
I've read that people are using that as a sign that they aren't writing with AI, however I imagine it's easy enough to ask the AI to not capitalize and to use typos.
replyjdanford 31 minutes ago
> I imagine it's easy enough to ask the AI to not capitalize
replyIt is! Relevant example from this week: https://sshhole.com/
kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 37 minutes ago
The missing punctuation at random times was infuriating. Never fun when you have to re-read a sentence because the word without punctuation is itself also a word.
replygoodmythical 34 minutes ago
have you really not been online long enough to be able to parse communication without unnecessary markup
replykyrillos50 2 hours ago
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?
reply
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
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.