BBQ Crew Member Buddy Brannan first turned us on to the wearable Tap alternative at last year s CSUN
Chancy has been using the accessory as well and she had her questions ready for Sabrina Kemeny, President and Co-Founder, when they met in the NFB Exhibit Hall. Find out about Tap Aloud, the Tap manager and the new Tap Mapper in this interview. Also, discover ways that you could use a Tap on each hand for some very interesting tasks. To learn more, or to order a Tap, visit the Tap with Us website.
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Transcript
We strive to provide an accurate transcription, though errors may occur.
Hide transcriptTranscribed by Grecia Ramirez
Direct from Orlando, it’s blindbargains.com coverage of NFB 2018, brought to you by Google
Our friends at Google are working hard to create great technology products for everyone. They’re inviting you to participate in Google user research studies, where you can help shape the future of accessible products and features and get rewarded for it. Check out our tweet for the sign-up link, at blind bargains, or head to google.com slash user research.
Now, here’s Chancey Fleet
CF: I’m here with Sabrina Kemeny, who is the president and one of the cofounders of Tap. And she’s got a wearable one-handed keyboard for Bluetooth. Hi.
SABRINA KEMENY: Hi.
CF: So tell us a little bit about how you wear this thing and what it feels like.
SK: Yeah. So it’s one-handed. It’s basically a set of connected rings that are very comfortable. Their adjustable. And it’s kind of a soft – very soft, plastic material, less generic material. You wear it on one hand, and it basically does anything a keyboard can do. So it replaces your keyboard and mouse, and it can transmit commands or text, punctuation, to anything that’s connected to it via Bluetooth. For instance your smartphone, your laptop, whatever device that supports Bluetooth, can use this as a keyboard.
CF: And it’s responding to your hand movements, and you can actually tap on any surface; right?
SK: That’s right. You can tap on any surface, basically as – when your fingertips touch down, it creates letters. So for instance, if I just tap my thumb on the table or on my head, I’m going to transmit the letter A to my device. If I tap my thumb and middle finger, I’m going to send a D to my device.
CF: Uh-huh.
SK: So it just – depending on which letter’s tapped – I’m sorry, which finger’s tapped, you’ll send different letters.
CF: Now, that alphabet, is it drawing from an existing practice or is it a brand-new set of chords?
SK: So it’s a brand-new set – a brand new alphabet. It’s based – it’s really designed for humans by humans, unlike the QWERTY keyboard, which is –
CF: Which is literally designed to slow you down?
SK: Yeah. It was designed to – right. So the keys wouldn’t cross each other and break. So this is designed, basically, these taps are mapped to the most frequently used letters in the English alphabet. Like, the vowels are just one finger tapping at a time. The most frequent consonants are mapped to the most easy – very easy taps. And likewise, the harder letters to create are mapped to – things like J, which aren’t used that much.
CF: Got it. So what gave you and your cofounders the idea to develop a wearable keyboard like this? Where did that come from?
SK: So the inventor and CEO, David Schick, was really – it was back in 2013, he was thinking – Google Glass had just come out, the smartwatches. And really, as screens were disappearing, he was like, well, what’s going to happen in the future? How are we going to interact with the electronic world if we don’t have screens, if we can’t, you know, we can’t see our screens or we don’t even have them?
And so the natural thing – he came up with a lot of different things, but your fingers are the most precise, accurate, multi-dexterous part of your body; they’re incredibly sensitive to touch. Everyone, sighted people alike, are really sensitive to what – you know, how – where your fingers are in space. And so he just said, oh, of course. We’re going to use – we can use our fingers to communicate. We can – and that’s how he came up with the idea.
I mean, we did try a lot of different things. It did take some twists and turns to actually get the final idea and everything working right and having it be really accurate, but that was the idea is really, screens are disappearing, so –
CF: And when did you realize that there might be particular relevance here in the blind community here for the product?
SK: Yeah. So it was so wonderful because we knew we hatted a tactile device, but I guess we didn’t put two and two together until I was at a dinner at a friend of mine’s, and literally, her daughter, who’s blind, turns to me – Kira – she says – she’s like, Sabrina, you do know that this would be good for the blind community; right? And I was like, uh, duh. I didn’t -- it was – a little lightbulb went off at that moment. And fortunately, it was pretty early in development, so actually, with her help – and we did actually use her over the months to bounce things – ideas off of – we did make it, I guess, is it called born accessible, I think they told us? Yeah.
CF: Yeah. It is called born accessible.
SK: So we did make it that way. So it’s – like, for instance, it has a vibration, haptic in it.
CF: So you don’t need to be looking for a light.
SK: So – yeah. So it – you know when it’s on, when it’s off, when you switch modes, you know, to numbers and things like that. And that actually makes it a better device for everybody, to be honest. The – having the vibration center has been very helpful.
CF: So it’s kind of layered. There are three modes that I know about. I’ve been experimenting with the Tap Strap for a few weeks now. So you can enter letters in one mode, you can enter numbers in another mode, and then there’s actually a mode that lets you issue screen reader commands.
SK: That’s right. So we just came out with a mapping, which assigns the iOS VoiceOver commands to various taps. So you are – you have to, again, you have to learn the taps, but when you’re in that mode, you can control your phone. You can navigate, you know, from app to – basically, almost everything you can do with VoiceOver, you can do –
CF: You can do quick-nav --
SK: Yes.
CF: -- you can go home, you can go to your app switcher –
SK: Yes.
CF: -- bring up the item chooser, all those kinds of things. And then for those that use a mouse, there’s actually a way to track the mouse pointer using –
SK: Your thumb.
CF: -- guiding with the side of your thumb. What’s that about?
SK: Yeah. So there’s an integrated mouse, and it’s exactly that. It’s basically a standard optical lacer mouse, except it’s built right into this little thumb ring, and as you said, there’s a smooth surface on the thumb ring, and when you glide that smooth surface on the – on, let’s say a table, it will – it acts just like a mouse. And so when your hand is down and gliding, it’s in Mouse mode, and when your hand is up, it’s in Text mode. So you don’t have to control it, it just knows which mode you’re in. Yeah.
CF: So let’s talk about actually wearing this thing day-to-day. I was shaking hands with some of your team members, and everybody’s got the Tap on their right hand, although if you’re left-handed or if you work with a cane in your right hand, you absolutely can wear the Tap on either side.
SK: Yes.
CF: So what makes it comfortable to wear all day? And – let’s see. What else do I want to know? Oh. Is it water resistant?
SK: Yeah. So I think it’s pretty comfortable. I wear it for hours at a time. I mean, it – because it has, like, a nylon braid – okay. It’s these rings that have an opening in the bottom with a nylon braid. And because of that, it pretty much does breathe. If it’s really hot, I might get a little bit of sweatiness under my fingers, but I don’t find that to be a problem. And it has to be – you know, normally, I don’t even – that doesn’t even happen.
It is water resistant, like if you get something on it, you can wipe it off, wipe it down with, like, a sponge, but it’s not waterproof. You can’t put this in the washing machine.
CF: Yeah.
SK: You can’t, you know – it’s –
CF: But you can quickly wash your hands and probably be okay.
SK: Yeah. You know, I’ve done it. It’s not really –
CF: Not recommended.
SK: -- not recommended. Not –
CF: Okay.
SK: Not really recommended, but yeah. It’s more like if it gets dirty and you want to wipe it down, wipe it off. That’s fine.
CF: Okay. Sounds good.
When I first heard about the Tap, I was a little bit worried about, like, I read braille and I use my touchscreen and I do a lot of other things with my hands, and I thought to myself, am I going to be issuing, like, all kinds of accidental taps all day long? But I found out that if you move your forefinger over to your thumb and touch the top of your thumb, that is where Power is. And all it takes is a quick tap of the Power button to say, hey. Stop listening. I’m going to be doing other stuff with my hands now. And I just wanted to mention that because when you talk about a wearable that you’re going to wear for hours, it’s important to have a way to control whether it’s listening to you or not.
SK: Yes. Thank you for bringing that up. Yeah. It’s kind of convenient to be able to turn it on and off with one hand, so you don’t, you know, have to use your other hand for that.
CF: So there is a little bit of a learning curve, but your company has developed an app. And it’s important for VoiceOver users in particular to know which app needs to be downloaded from the App Store for the best experience.
SK: Right. So the audible learning game is called Tap Aloud, and that’s available in the apple app store – well, App Store. And it is a – it has game-ified the learning system. And we find that within a couple of hours of playing the game, you’ve pretty much got the letters memorized. And then, to get proficient and really fast, you need to play it, you know, more.
CF: Uh-huh.
SK: And practice more. A few minutes a day for a few weeks, you can get up to 30, 40 words a minute. Our fastest Tapper right now is 62 words per minute. So you can get quite proficient. But yes. The app to download is called Tap Aloud. It’s – if you forget that, you can look on our website on the accessibility page, or when you buy it, there’s a utility app that comes with it, Tap Manager, and all the apps are listed in there. So we have it in a few places.
CF: And the website is tap with us?
SK: Tapwithus.com. Yeah. All one word. Tap with us.
CF: I’ve shown the Tap Strap to a couple people, and they immediately ask me whether or not you could just use two of them or one of them in a sequence and perhaps use braille chording.
SK: Yes. So you can definitely wear two of them. You can pair two straps to one device, and they can be both communicating with one device. People do that now. They’ve like, let’s say, played games with each other. But we do not yet have a braille – what we would call a mapping, that would naturally map your braille keyboard to the Strap.
However, we’re so excited. Just last week, we’ve gone into beta on a brand-new product that’s called the TapMapper, which allows anybody – you don’t have to be a developer. Anyone can easily map any key on the keyboard to any finger combination. And so we are actually hoping that someone in our community will do the braille mapping for us. But that hasn’t been done yet. But we’re hoping that’ll – somebody will do it. Because there’s no reason not to. There’s – it would be – it could be done now. So we’ll see.
CF: So who are your customers? Are a lot of your customers blind?
SK: So about – we started selling in February. And to date, about 10 percent of our customers are blind. So definitely more than the general population, but not -- you know, this is a product for everyone.
CF: Uh-huh.
SK: You know.
CF: How did you figure that, out that 10 percent of your customers are blind?
SK: Well, I guess we don’t know exactly, but 10 percent of the people have downloaded Tap Aloud, and Tap Aloud –
CF: That tells you something. Yeah.
SK: Yeah. So Tap Aloud – I wish we did have a more accurate way, but I think that’s – it’s going to be close; okay? So Tap Aloud is all audible, so it’s probably a good indicator.
CF: Got it. So can you tell me about the pricing and the structure of the warranty?
SK: Yes. So it’s $179 online, and actually, even though people aren’t here, if you type in Tap loves NFB to the coupon code, through – from now through the end of July, you will get $20 dollars off. So it’s $179, but there’s that 20-dollar discount. And there is a 30-day return policy, and there is a one-year warranty.
CF: Okay. Sabrina, thank you so much for telling us about Tap, and enjoy the rest of your convention.
SK: Thank you so much.
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Joe Steinkamp is no stranger to the world of technology, having been a user of video magnification and blindness related electronic devices since 1979. Joe has worked in radio, retail management and Vocational Rehabilitation for blind and low vision individuals in Texas. He has been writing about the A.T. Industry for 15 years and podcasting about it for almost a decade.
