Porting Android 16 to my blind mother's keypad phone

Whew, rough :)

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

	▲	z1xus 31 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		yeah, it feels like profiting off of people's accessibility needs, which is pretty sad, but unfortunately, that's the world we live in ;'( 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
	▲	tsunamifury an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		It’s a market size to staffing to cost thing. It’s not an evil thing. 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.

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e12e 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Great story and good write-up. Might have enjoyed a little more detail in places - so it would be more easily repeatable for someone else - but perhaps that would belong in a readme.

I guess this proves that android is still usefully more open than iOS.

	▲	z1xus 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		thank you! i initially wanted to release it somewhere or make a thread on xda, but never got my hands on it unfortuantely

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jrmg an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

So nice to read a write up like this. Not afraid to use AI tools, but still writing up the project personally from the perspective of the human running the show.

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haunter 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Interestingly back in 2007 Google demo'd Android on a Blackberry-like keypad phone https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FJHYqE0RDg

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NordStreamYacht 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

If I remember correctly the first android phones were supposed to be keypad phones, and only the launch of the iPhone made them change course.

I remember some phones came with a keypad, but they disappeared quite quickly.

	▲	literalAardvark 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I was lucky enough to need a HTC Touch Pro 2 for work back in the day. 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.
	▲	ThePowerOfFuet 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		This is correct.

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tsunamifury 33 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

God it makes me feel old to hear youngins not even be able to quote recent history correctly.

Android launched with a keyboard.

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lindskogen 44 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Love it! Makes me wanna get a landfill android with physical keys and some amount of ram and get it working again for my grandparents.

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velo_aprx 28 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

A new sentence starts with a capital letter.

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fodkodrasz 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Great work! Congratulations!

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well_ackshually 15 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>holding both volume keys turns talkback on and off, and android plays a sound when you do it. a very loud sound. WHY IS IT SO LOUD

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.

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maxloh an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> so i wrote one small app that does the keypad, the home screen and the keyboard.

Maybe that is worth open-sourcing.

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margalabargala 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Ugh. The lack of capitalization turns this into an unreadable wall of text. What a terrible trend to jump on.

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z1xus an hour ago | parent | next [-]

fair point, i do that only because i'm very used to it. i may introduce an option to auto-capitalize, and maybe different fonts to improve readability (and accessibility), especially for people with dyslexia

	▲	margalabargala 44 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		If there was a toggle at the top to do so, I would hit it and have a much easier time reading your post :)

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rationalist 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I've read that people are using that as a sign that they aren't writing with AI, however I imagine it's easy enough to ask the AI to not capitalize and to use typos.

	▲	jdanford an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> I imagine it's easy enough to ask the AI to not capitalize It is! Relevant example from this week: https://sshhole.com/

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kQq9oHeAz6wLLS an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The missing punctuation at random times was infuriating. Never fun when you have to re-read a sentence because the word without punctuation is itself also a word.

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goodmythical an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

have you really not been online long enough to be able to parse communication without unnecessary markup

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kyrillos50 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This is lovely work. Building for older users taught me how much "obvious" UI isn't. Most of my users are 55+, and the bugs that mattered were never the clever ones: layouts breaking at large system font sizes, and people not finding an app because they typed the name the way it sounds. A physical keypad with a screen reader that actually works sounds like it solves a whole class of those problems at once. How does she handle text input, T9 or voice?