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
really cool to hear from someone who's actually affected by all of this though! and thanks for the talkback tip, i should look more into that
> feels like profiting off of people's accessibility needs
It is produced for other reasons.
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.
About the keypad, normally key presses are reported to apps by the system as key events (pressed, released etc) and keycodes. There is a mapping between hardware keys and software key codes that can be overridden through kcm files.
More about this here: https://source.android.com/docs/core/interaction/input/keybo...
I guess this proves that android is still usefully more open than iOS.
I remember some phones came with a keypad, but they disappeared quite quickly.
Now on an UniHertz Titan 2 which is ok, but the landscape slider phones were just that bit more practical imho..
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.
Android launched with a keyboard.
Maybe that is worth open-sourcing.
The fun part about it is that even if you lower TalkBack's sound, enable the debug tool that just writes the text in a toast because listening to accessibility announcements all day long is a recipe to go mad, turning it on/off always give you the horribly loud TALKBACK ENABLED, all my colleagues know when one of us is doing accessibility work.
It is! Relevant example from this week: https://sshhole.com/
no ones going to argue that the page should be rewritten in chinese spanish or hindi so that the information would be easier for those readers to parse
to assume that the reader needs punctuation or even proper splling in order to rcv the message is nthing more than an extra nicety for only an english reading crowd
I am deliberately avoiding punctuation, there, because adding it does not add any information that is not already present in the text in order to demonstrate the point: The punctuation is not necessary. The information was transmitted and recieved. We know it is recieved because it was 'harder' to parse, not 'impossible' to parse.
Is it nice to have? Maybe. Perhaps for some.
Necessary? Certainly not.
Your spellings certainly make it a lot harder.
I'll draw inspiration from you and assume you don't need it spelled out.
How i thought ui should work and how blind users use ui was night and day had to do like 9 rounds of ui change with people over weeks.