Low Vision Keyboard
Building an adaptive keyboard customized and taylored to clients needs
The Need
Brianna has a cognitive disability and operates around a K-1st reading and writing level. Brianna enjoys exploring the internet—e.g., watching videos, listening to audiobooks, and playing interactive word games. Aurora wants to teach Brianna to efficiently keyboard such that she can navigate a computer with further independence as well as complete educational assignments, but this requires a low-vision- friendly keyboard. At present, Brianna uses a high-contrast keyboard with enlarged keys— but key quantity, spacing, appearance, and lack of feedback present barriers to motivating learning.
The Solution
To address the need to motivate our user while she develops her typing skills, we have created an adaptive keyboard to accommodate her abilities and incorporate her aesthetic preferences. One of the challenges of this product was ensuring our keyboard was customized to our user’s low vision parameters, cognitive age, and physical ability. Upon gauging the parameters of our user’s ideal keyboard in an initial meeting, we decided to build the current keyboard prototype upon the skeleton of an existing AbleNet BigKeys LX keyboard—having ensured that this model suited the user’s keyboard form factor choice. We have implemented varied mechanical and electronic components to facilitate keyboard use and navigation—e.g., custom 3D printed keycaps, an interactive learning graphical user interface (GUI), and LED backlighting.
The Team
Danyelle Veillard
Daniela
Elder-Gotta
Abby Lau
Jvalanti Prasad