Smart Braille is a fully functional mobile application that primarily aims to provide faster communication for the blind and visually impaired people through their mobile phones. It is developed by Stefan Tasevski and Nikola Tasevski. The functionalities of the application can be divided into two purpose sets. The first is writing on a mobile phone, and the second is reading a text with the help of it. Writing on phones by the blind or visually impaired people is carried out in two ways, by using the standard system keyboard whose main disadvantage is the time it takes when searching for the characters or using the speech-to-text feature which for obvious reasons is not always possible and even worse, completely violates the privacy of the user. In this respect, Smart Braille offers a Braille alphabet based keyboard (Currently only English Braille alphabet is supported) that consists of six keys that occupy the whole screen. They correspond to the six points used to mark all the characters in Braille alphabet. Although now, instead of detecting the combinations with the tips of the fingers, they are tapped on the screen to write the characters. Through appropriate adjustments such as the different beeps for the keys, a variety of swipes across the screen (to delete a character, delete a whole word, enter a space, enter a new row etc.) simplicity and speed are provided in using the keyboard. By doing this, the blind and visually impaired people knowing the alphabet can write messages privately, quickly and without error. This is the first mobile application that implements a system keyboard based on the Braille alphabet that is completely designed for usage by the blind and visually impaired people. The keyboard has a lot of features such as auto correction, Grade 2 Braille auto-detection, different sounds for different keys, all the functionalities are covered with swipes, made accessible with TalkBack, tutorial, keyboard customization and more. In conclusion, Smart Braille provides a better, more private and more effective mobile texting communication for the blind and visually impaired people, it is a great tool and we are eager to see how far it will go. However, we are not planning to stop here. Our next goal is to make this app available for iOS. We want to make implementations for different language interpretations of the Braille Alphabet. And most important of all, constant updates are necessary in which we will consult with the users, so they have a better experience.
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