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Raman: Hello, everyone.
And welcome to episode four of our sequence of videos
on Eyes-Free Android.
I'm T.V. Raman. Chen: And I'm Charles Chen.
Raman: So we left off on the end of the last episode
by leaving you with a teaser about the contact manager
phone book portion of the talking dialer.
So that's where we'll pick up.
So the talking dialer, actually has two modes.
By default, it's not in dialing mode.
And you can switch to phonebook mode
by hitting the 'Menu' button.
It's a toggle,
so you can basically toggle between the two modes.
When you're in the phone book,
your list of contacts pops up.
If you have very few contacts,
then you can just scroll through the contacts
and hit the 'Call' button to call the current contact.
So let's show you that.
Okay, so scroll.
computer voice: Anne Hansen. male voice: Cell.
computer voice: Chaitanya, personal.
male voice: Cell. Raman: So notice that
scrolling through the contacts
basically speaks the name of the contact
and the type of contact.
Whether if it's a cell number or if it's personal, whatever.
So this is nice.
But of course, most users have more than a few contacts.
And so you need a quick way
to skim through and filter contacts.
You can do what the default contact manager on Android does
which is open up the QWERTY keyboard,
and hit a couple of letters,
and filter it down that way.
But one of the initial goals for the design of Marvin
and the Eyes-Free Project was that you would do as much
as possible with one hand without looking at the screen.
And it's very difficult to use the QWERTY keyboard
with one hand.
So what can we do with the touch screen
that allows one-handed input of letters?
So the previous video we showed you the stroke dialer,
and showed you how we could do numbers with it.
Let's sort of apply that same approach
for using relative positioning to do letters.
This time, instead of thinking of it as a phone keypad...
think compass directions.
So think north and south as a pair,
east and west as a pair,
northeast and southwest as a pair,
and northwest and southeast as a pair.
So you have four pairs.
We're doing this for Google,
so let's associate four mnemonic colors with those.
One with each pair.
So a red, a blue, a green, and a yellow.
We have, what, 26 letters in the alphabet,
and you need a few more punctuations and useful things
like a space character, and so on.
So let's say we put eight letters on each of these colors.
So think a red circle, a blue circle,
a green circle, and a yellow circle.
And visualize arranging the letters of the alphabet
on those four circles.
We'll show you a screen layout that demonstrates this mapping.
It shows up whenever you touch the screen.
So notice that as I touch the screen here,
you see a red A, a blue I,
a green Q, a yellow Y.
Also notice that you also see
a red E, a blue M, a green U.
What this is showing you is that these letters
have been put in these circles.
And to dial, we basically trace to the circle that you want
and then trace along it.
So to dial 'R', which is the first letter of my name,
you would first enter the circle you need to
which is the green circle.
So you'd go to Q, and then-- female voice: Q.
Raman: What is it that it said in the woman's voice?
Now trace along the circle.
female voice: R Raman: And that's an R.
That's what you want, you pick up your finger.
computer voice: No contact is found.
Raman: So in the scales,
there was no contact starting with an 'R'.
But if there had been, you would have jumped to that contact.
female voice: Q, R, S, T. computer voice: T.V. Raman.
Dream cell. Raman: Notice that this time,
the letter 'T' and it jumped to the first contact
that had it--it started with a 'T',
and it jumped to my name as T.V. Raman.
So the idea is very simple.
You basically pick the circle,
and then you trace along that circle,
and you pick up your finger.
Now what's nice about this organization
is that even though we've put eight letters
on each circle, because you can enter each circle
at either the top or the bottom.
What this means is that typically
any letter that you want is, at most, three steps away.
And I say "at most" because most letters
are actually one or two steps away.
So if we wanted to do 'M', for instance,
you would just stroke down,
and it's on the blue circle.
So you'd just stroke down to get an 'M'.
female voice: M.
Raman: So there is that.
'M' is just one step.
Similarly, if you want to do an 'H',
'H' is on the first-- on the red circle.
But it's--you don't have to trace
all the way around the circle,
becuase you can go up to the 'A',
and then go counter-clockwise,
and you get to 'H' with one step.
female voice: H.
computer voice: No contacts found.
Raman: So notice that it immediately tells you
whether there are contacts starting with that letter.
Otherwise, it jumps to that group.
So this input technique is very, very quick.
Typically what you do is that you
at most enter one or two letters this way,
and then quickly use the scroll wheel,
and you get to the contact that you want.
I hope as you use this over time
for many more types of text input.
And we've demonstrated this for the contact manager,
because it's proved really useful here.
Thank you for watching, and have fun dialing.
Bye. Chen: Thanks, bye.