The tactile mouse

Recently I (along with a friend) worked with an Israel-based company, http://www.tactile-world.com, to present their product, a "tactile mouse" in the techshare india 2010.
This is a note about this mouse. Hopefully, those who couldn't attend the conference or didn't get a chance to come to our stall will be able to get a better sense of what this alpha/concept product brings to the table.

Look and feel:
It looks like a regular mouse, slightly larger. A regular mouse has 2 buttons for clicking in the front. This mouse instead has 4 braille cells with 8 pins each in place of those buttons.
A person holds this just like a regular mouse and now has 16 dots under each of two fingers.
On each side of the mouse are 2 buttons each (making a total of 4 buttons) for giving the various commands for using the mouse.


function:
The mouse provides 4 functions with its currently implemented software (the product team is constantly coming up with newer innovative functions and applications):
1. A full fledged refreshable braille display.: This at a fraction of the cost of a regular braille display simply because this uses only 4 cells instead of the traditional 40 cells. 1 braille cell costs anywhere between $40 to $80 and is by far the costliest component of a braille display. This product innovatively uses just four cells to provide a full braille display (imagine using a tread mill instead of walking on the road to visualize how this works).

2. a tactile graphics display: Since the braille cells here are mounted on a mouse, they can be moved in any direction corresponding to the screen. This gives an unlimited area for displaying a tactile image -- all be it, a user is looking at 32 pixels at a time. With a little practice, following diagrams maps etc. becomes completely possible. To visualize this, think of how you will use "cut outs" to explain the shape of the states in the map of a country or how you will draw a tactile diagram on some kind of wool slate. On the mouse, you encounter raised dots wherever there is an image on the screen and flat dots for white space.

3. A games console - they even have several video games for the blind. This uses the mouse' ability to show tactile graphics, and animations created using the flowing motion of dots and the accompanying software's ability to accept mouse gestures as inputs to create real and interesting games.

4. A screen reader that uses the unique ability of this mouse to display animations used by flowing motion of dots to provide rich access to applications like MS word and IE and more are being built.

To control all the above functions, the mouse software accepts 3 kinds of inputs (mostly overlapping):
- keyboard commands -- just like current screen readers
- spoken commands -- like those with dragon/jsay or windows native speech recognition.
- Mouse Gestures -- These help productivity because you don't have to constantly take your hand away from the mouse to give keyboard commands.

The mouse gives output in the form of speech using MS sapi synthesizer, refreshable braile for text, and tactile for graphics.

We had long conversations with the CTO of tactile world and the inventor of this mouse and we gave a lot of inputs to him about features that will make this mouse more effective, easier to use, earlier to market etc.
Probably, the strongest features on the mouse were the tactile display, the games console and the low cost braille display.
Its weak point was its current ability to function like a stand alone screen reader, specially when compared to existing screen readers. We gave inputs to try to integrate the mouse with existing screen readers (or at least one open source one like NVDA) and get the mouse out in themarket before trying to build a full fledged screen reader on their own.
I think a full screen reader accompanying the mouse does make sense in the long term because that screen reader will be able to innovatively use this mouse's unique features while bringing down the total cost of ownership for a person.

The above is meant to describe the mouse for potential blind users who would not have benefitted from a photo here and is not intended to violate any part of the NDA I signed with the company.