Tactile Innovations announces the development of TacDial, an eyes free dialing program for the iPhone. TacDial allows the user to do basic dialing on the iPhone without looking at the screen.
Eyes free dialing is useful in environments where it is inconvenient or undesireable to redirect one's eyes to the screen, in order to use the iPhone's on-screen keyboard. One particularly relevent situation includes dialing while driving.
By relying on auditory and vibration feedback rather than visual feedback, TacDial also makes the iPhone more accessible to visually impaired users.
TacDial works by replacing absolute button locations with a gesture based input method. The gesture based dialing method is based on the standard 12 cell telephone keypad.
The user can touch anywhere on the iPhone screen. Wherever the user touches the screen, an image of the keypad appears, with the "5" centered at the user's finger location.
Dialing any digit is a touch-drag-and-release motion. Dialing a "1" is as simple as touching anywhere on the screen and dragging up and left before releasing. Similarly, one dials a "6" by touching anywhere, dragging one's finger to the right before releasing.
Each digit is confirmed audibly with a voiced number (i.e. the iPhone says "Seven" when dialing the digit "7"). Tick sounds indicate having moved from one cell of the pad to another.
Backspacing is accomplished by touching and dragging all the way off the screen to the left. Once satisfied with the number, dialing is accomplished by touching and dragging one's finger off the screen to the right.
The first version of TacDial will not include saving to or dialing from the users contacts. This feature is slated for future releases of the software. Stay tuned for release dates, screen shots, pricing, and videos.
