Silencing Speech With A Wave Of Your Hand On Android 2.0

Update To Android Access: TalkBack

Smart phones tend to be short on physical buttons --- evendevices like the G1 or MotoRola Droid have very few buttons when thephysical keyboard is not open. This provides interestingchallenges when designing an efficient eyes-free interface ---especially given the old maxim Speech is silvern, but silenceis golden!.Said differently, once you have built a systemthat talks back, the first thing you want to build is anefficient means of silencing spoken feedback.

Early versions of TalkBack on Android skimmed by without astop speech button --- you basically moved from one activity toanother,and the speech produced by the new activity effectivelystopped ongoing spoken output. However, as we make more and moreapplications work seamlessly with our Access APIs, it's alwaysbeen clear to us that we need a global stop speechgesture! Notice that I said gesture --- notkey --- stopping speech is a critical function that we'dlike to enable without having to pull out the physical keyboard,and something we'd like to have devices without a physicalkeyboard.

In the spirit of the dual to every access challenge is an opportunity toinnovate, we recently launched a new experimental TalkBackfeature on devices running Android 2.0. Devices on the Android2.0 platform have a proximity sensor on the top frontleft corner of the phone --- this is typically used to lock thescreen when you're holding the phone up to your ear when on aphone call. As the name implies, the proximitysensorfires when you get close to it --- you can activate itby waving your hand close to the top left corner of the phone. Asan experimental feature, we have configured the latest version ofTalkBack to silence ongoing speech if you wave your hand infront of the proximity sensor.

Note that this is a new, experimental feature --- it'ssomething that we welcome feedback on our public Eyes-Free GoogleGroup. We'd like to know if you accidentally activatestop speechbecause of this new feature. In having usedit for a few weeks, I find that I am not triggering itaccidentally --- but that might well be a function of how I holdthe phone.

What Devices Does This Available On?

Note that at the time of writing, the devices that have aproximity sensor that I have used this on include:

• MotoRola Droid from Verizon
• Google NexusOne

Note that the G1 and other older Android devices did not havea proximity sensor.