Designing a Smart-Phone Alphabet for the Illiterate

Peanut farmers in India are helping to design a text-messaging app called EasySMS that could aid the many millions who can't read or write. MIT Technology Review reports.

... Computer scientist Hendrik Knoche at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) designed the new smart-phone interface for the farmers together with P.R. Sheshagiri Rao, a farmer in CK Pura who once worked as an agricultural scientist elsewhere in India.

Back in Lausanne, Knoche challenged his students to design a text-messaging application for illiterate users of touch-screen phones. The result, easySMS, lets users compose their own messages by highlighting single words from incoming messages, playing them aloud, and copying and pasting them into new messages. The application also contains a small dictionary of common words and phrases.

Read more.

Previously:

EasySMS app enables illiterate people to read, compose and send text messages - During the course of a mobile interaction design class in 2011 at Lausanne Switzerland's EPFL, students had to come up with an idea for - and design an application on mobile phones - to improve the livelihoods of people living in rural communities in developing countries.

Here is one of their projects: EasySMS which enables illiterate people to read, compose and send text messages. Read full article.

emily | 12:50 PM | Enhanced Keyboards for SMS, New SMS Services, Technology |
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