Porting Android 16 to my blind mother's keypad phone (z1x.us)

75 pointsby z1xus4 days ago20 comments

zersiax 30 minutes ago

Whew, rough :)

The whole "let's make an Android device for seniors/the blind/whoever and pin it on an ancient Android version/spec it really low but charge a premium" thing is unfortunately not new.

If you look at the Blindshell 2 and 3 you see plenty of this happening as well, not to mention way more expensive hardware like the BrailleSense Polaris which last time I checked ran on Android 5, scary "Mind updating right now please?" Google Play warnings and everything.

If it helps any, Talkback does have a set of keyboard commands it responds to, perhaps making your keypad buttons fire those means the implementation might be less brittle but given what you've already had to deal with maybe just not touching it ever again might be thebest thing at this point :)

Disclaimer: Actually blind Android user/developer

tsunamifury 12 minutes ago

It’s a market size to staffing to cost thing. It’s not an evil thing.

The reality is serving a niche market does not generate enough top line revenue to fund large teams to keep the product going at state of the art.

e12e an hour ago

Great story and good write-up. Might have enjoyed a little more detail in places - so it would be more easily repeatable for someone else - but perhaps that would belong in a readme.

I guess this proves that android is still usefully more open than iOS.

z1xus an hour ago

thank you! i initially wanted to release it somewhere or make a thread on xda, but never got my hands on it unfortuantely

lindskogen 8 minutes ago

Love it! Makes me wanna get a landfill android with physical keys and some amount of ram and get it working again for my grandparents.

jrmg 28 minutes ago

So nice to read a write up like this. Not afraid to use AI tools, but still writing up the project personally from the perspective of the human running the show.

haunter 3 hours ago

Interestingly back in 2007 Google demo'd Android on a Blackberry-like keypad phone https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FJHYqE0RDg

NordStreamYacht 2 hours ago

If I remember correctly the first android phones were supposed to be keypad phones, and only the launch of the iPhone made them change course.

I remember some phones came with a keypad, but they disappeared quite quickly.

literalAardvark 2 hours ago

I was lucky enough to need a HTC Touch Pro 2 for work back in the day.

I spent hours fixing scripts and restarting servers at 3 am or on off-days from it. Server intervention times of seconds. Best device ever!

The keyboard was comfy, screen was good enough, and you could use your entire screen for the console because the keyboard was separate.

It also looked wicked.

These days with these pathetic media consumption devices if I need to do something I pull my laptop out.

ThePowerOfFuet an hour ago

This is correct.

maxloh an hour ago

> so i wrote one small app that does the keypad, the home screen and the keyboard.

Maybe that is worth open-sourcing.

fodkodrasz an hour ago

Great work! Congratulations!

margalabargala an hour ago

Ugh. The lack of capitalization turns this into an unreadable wall of text. What a terrible trend to jump on.

rationalist an hour ago

I've read that people are using that as a sign that they aren't writing with AI, however I imagine it's easy enough to ask the AI to not capitalize and to use typos.

jdanford 27 minutes ago

> I imagine it's easy enough to ask the AI to not capitalize

It is! Relevant example from this week: https://sshhole.com/

z1xus an hour ago

fair point, i do that only because i'm very used to it. i may introduce an option to auto-capitalize, and maybe different fonts to improve readability (and accessibility), especially for people with dyslexia

margalabargala 8 minutes ago

If there was a toggle at the top to do so, I would hit it and have a much easier time reading your post :)

kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 33 minutes ago

The missing punctuation at random times was infuriating. Never fun when you have to re-read a sentence because the word without punctuation is itself also a word.

goodmythical 30 minutes ago

have you really not been online long enough to be able to parse communication without unnecessary markup

kyrillos50 an hour ago

This is lovely work. Building for older users taught me how much "obvious" UI isn't. Most of my users are 55+, and the bugs that mattered were never the clever ones: layouts breaking at large system font sizes, and people not finding an app because they typed the name the way it sounds. A physical keypad with a screen reader that actually works sounds like it solves a whole class of those problems at once. How does she handle text input, T9 or voice?