CHENNAI: In a bid to provide the visually challenged a convenient solution for typing, K4 keyboard, a comprehensive keyboard software that enables fast typing was launched on Saturday. The brainchild of former professor of Anna University V Krishnamoorthy, the software includes emojis, symbols, subscript and superscript among other features.

“Currently, when a visually challenged person inputs text in touch screen phones, the voice over is kept on to tell which key is being pressed. The letters are typed one after the other. As the keys are small here, it takes a lot of time for input and there is room for error,” said Krishnamoorthy.
K4 Keyboard has just four keys, arranged in a 2*2 grid, and numbered one to four. The keyboard occupies the lower half of the phone screen, so each key is more than one inch wide and the error in touching the required key is almost nil.

Explaining how it works, he said, “Each digit, letter and frequently-used symbols are given specific swipes. They are carefully chosen to be horizontal and vertical to avoid confusion. We have 336 such swipes, giving ample space for letters of any language.” It has a practice mode, where users can learn the swipes on their own. 

Currently, 13 languages are available in the keyboard including English, Tamil, French, German and Arabic. One of the major advantages is that the keyboard comes with a unicode for emojis. “Usually, when somebody sends us an emoji, we do not know what it is, because there is no voice over for it. But, in this keyboard, the unicode is read out, like thumbs up or wink. So, now we can both send and receive a smiley,” said V Sivaraman, associate professor, Presidency College, who is visually challenged.
The demo version of K4 is available on PlayStore. Krishnamoorthy’s ultimate aim is to eliminate the need for scribes.