In order to touch type correctly, you need feedback. This product provides three different ways to get that feedback. You can watch the text area to see the letters being typed. You can listen to the letters being typed. Or you can use our braile plastic covers to feel which letter you have typed.
First let us recall the feedback on the regular iPhone keyboard. As you touch each letter, a little bubble appears, so that you can see which letter you are touching. As you type a letter you can hear the click sound, you can turn off the sound in preferences, and you can see the text appearing in the text area. When the visually impaired have enabled voice over, they can hear each key spoken as they slide their finger over the keyboard. To type the key, they have to hit then raise their finger and tap the key, or else touch elsewhere on the screen. Now let us see how the TextFaster feedback works.
Recall that TextFaster offers three types of feedback. Watching the text works great. Listening to the text also works great, but is a bit slow. It is surprising how many characters I can type in the time it takes to speak a single character. And of course the best solution is to have the Braille cover, so that you can feel that you have typed the correct letter. For the Vision impared the plastic cover is particularly useful, it lets them know where the buttons are located.
Touch typing is way faster than typing using visual feedback. It may be obvious, but allow me to tell you my personal story. I have been developing and testing this software, so I was always looking at the keys, to make sure everything was working correctly. But then I decided to test the touch typing, particularly since I am in the process of writing this page. What did I learn? Touch typing is so much faster than typing with visual feedback. Soon I had a little program running in my brain, telling me where to type next. And that program started to run earlier, before i needed to hit the next key, and boy did my typing speed pick up. Pretty soon the longest delay was waiting for the letter to be spoken. So I changed the audio feedback. There is now the option for just hearing a keyboard click for each letter I type, instead of the full spoken letter. I am now typing so fast, I am amazed. Try it. But for that you need the plastic covers. I am still sending them out for free, I just need your mailing address.
Then I ran another experiment today. I removed the braille cover. Again I was amazed. With audio feedback turned on, I could touch type! But after some thought I realized that it is way slower than using the Braille cover, just because speaking the letters takes so long.
It is a strange thing human factors. Particularly when the observer is the observed, I wonder if our perceptions are correct.