I'm a blind person and have used this feature on iPhone for years. It's just so, so much faster than anything else out there. Not as fast as a physical qwerty, but close. For people living in the U.S. who have learned english grade 2 braille (basically characters that let you type common combinations of letters quickly), it's probably even faster. Using the touch-based qwerty with a screenreader is doable, but very, very slow. To explain some of your concerns, yes, it reads aloud the letters you type, and reads whole words after a space. You have some basic editing gestures, like delete character or delete word. If you need more, you go out of the braille screen input mode, edit and then go back, that's jhow it works on iOS, at least.
btw. This feature wasn't invented by Apple. The first app that had this was called M Braille, and it was pretty expensive. It was rather inefficient, as you had to tpype the text in the app, copy it out and paste, as iOS didn't have external keyboard support back then. People still preferred that over using the qwerty though. Then, when iOS8 became a thing, M Braille was essentially sherlocked, as the feature had became part of iOS itself, and it was so much easier to use.
What other innovative keyboards are out there? And what should be out there but isn't?
I, for one, have a particular interest in a keyboard that leaves the largest possible viewing area on the iPhone - to help with typing essays. Ideally a hardware keyboard, sidekick-style, but I'll take anything at this point.
There is Minuum, with a pretty fascinating one-row keyboard, and it worked pretty well by then!
Sadly it is pretty much dead (no update for three years)and worked pretty well. However keyboards have vastly improved in the last 3 years, and not having updates is really an issue nowadays.
I miss my Android G1's keyboard. I would still much prefer a hardware keyboard than a touch one but I think those will never come back on mainstream phones
The iPhone implementation works quite well[0]
The one piece that I thought was concerning was apparently talkback gestures do not work when the Braille keyboard is enabled, so how do you use it as part of your standard interaction paradigm while reading with the screen reader and then typing, for instance in a message conversation?
As far as I can tell, there is still no way to 'read back' the content using this system. Does it really provider much value if I cant check what I just typed?
I've never used braille but the situation I was envisioning was a blind person on the tube, receiving a message, they can listen to it with earphones plugged in, but may not want to speak the response out loud.
In this case they would type the message using this keyboard, and could have it read back out loud to check it.
It could also read back to you each letter after it's inputted for confirmation.
I know a blind guy at work and he is almost entirely using text-to-speech to drive his cell phone and computer. When you overhear it, it's just lots of menu options and webpage text being read off super quickly at 200+% speed.
TTS aside, there's a Braille display integrator from Google called BrailleBack that could be used. Then again, many Braille devices have input support too. I'm sighted but I've considered getting one to play around with and learn to read in the dark when I want to rest my eyes but still want to read fast.
I imagine this'll be a godsend for visually-impaired people in technical fields especially. Lord knows dictation is woefully insufficient whenever you're talking with less common words...
Has anyone ever used this sort of keyboard? I had a concept in mind for a glove based input system that would use chorded gestures like this and I was wondering how intuitive it would be.
btw. This feature wasn't invented by Apple. The first app that had this was called M Braille, and it was pretty expensive. It was rather inefficient, as you had to tpype the text in the app, copy it out and paste, as iOS didn't have external keyboard support back then. People still preferred that over using the qwerty though. Then, when iOS8 became a thing, M Braille was essentially sherlocked, as the feature had became part of iOS itself, and it was so much easier to use.