iPhone Debate.

[Jeffery Mewtamer]

I'll give up my keyboard and command-line when you young whipper
snappers pry them from my cold, dead fingers.

Joking aside, I'm actually a millennial myself and suspect I'm
actually one of the younger members on this list. Still, even when I
counted myself among the sighted, which wasn't even five years ago, I
thought touchscreens a nice supplement to keyboards and gaming
controls, but a piss-poor replacement for proper buttons. I loved the
touchscreen on my DS, 3DS, and PSVita, but my smartphone often left me
wishing the slide out keyboard was larger(I couldn't touch type on it
because the keys were so small and close together) and that it had
more than one face button when the keyboard was recessed. Also didn't
like that I couldn't use a mechanical pencil as a dumb stylus on my
smartphone like I could on my DS(damn capacitive touchscreens not
noticing plastic scraping against their surface).

That said, I'd love for touchscreens with electrostatic vibration to
become as ubiquitous as normal touchscreens already are.

If you haven't heard, electrostatic vibration allows a charged surface
covered in a thin insulator to simulate various textures, and adding
this to a touchscreen allows for tactile output.

A relevant Wikipedia article can be found at:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrovibration

And Disney is doing research under the trademark Tesla Touch.

I found out about it from an article in a recent issue of Choice
Magazine Listening, and it struck me as something with potential to
both make technology more accessible to the blind and become
mainstream enough ww won't have to pay a premium for devices featuring
it.

In the meantime, I'm going to stick with devices that have physical keyboards.

-- 
Sincerely,

Jeffery Wright
President Emeritus, Nu Nu Chapter, Phi Theta Kappa.
Former Secretary, Student Government Association, College of the Albemarle.