My friend changed my life by cold-calling on a Wednesday afternoon.
I have never been able to physically hold and use a cellphone due to physical limitations. My solution to this problem was to mirror the device to my computer, which works great… until I have to leave my desk.
When you go out in public, it’s like a plague, everyone is looking down at their phone. I just drive back and forth daydreaming. It wasn’t until my friend started cold-calling that this changed.
The windows phone link application allows you to connect your device via bluetooth, so my friend called me one afternoon to ask me how he sounded.
“Sounds fine to me?” I said not understanding what he was trying to accomplish.
“Alright, great. I’m going to start calling now. I wasn’t sure if it was using my microphone or not.” he said.
A flurry of ideas rushed to my head since he had said this. I have wanted to do something similar but I couldn’t get it to work over USB. I tried various AudioRelay programs to no avail.
I purchased a Bluetooth adapter for $10 and within minutes I could use my cellphone and my computer’s microphone. This made me realize that I could pair other bluetooth devices to my phone. I went to the store later that week and purchased a cellphone holder typically used for cars and a bluetooth trackball mouse.
I went home and had some help to unbox and mount the phone onto the tray of my wheelchair. I then had my family navigate to the connected devices setting in my phone to add the mouse as a device. This was a great naive approach.
The trackball mouse is pretty large, so it created challenges because my wheelchair’s joystick sits right in front of me. I noticed as we were adding the mouse as a device there was another option called “TY” which seemed curious. That’s when it hit me.
My Wheelchair’s qlogic 3 has built-in bluetooth support, so when the technician configured the chair he must’ve named the bluetooth after me. In the auxiliary menu, there’s an option to add a new connection, which then turns my wheelchair’s joystick into a mouse.
The default setting uses dwell, which starts in a positional mode until your cursor idles for the defined dwell amount. When you reach the dwell amount you then can click, click and drag, or return. The mouse is limited by only having four possible inputs, so I decided to keep using dwell mode because switching modes manually felt awkward.
Swiping and navigating felt uncomfortable with my mouse as a joystick. It took me about ten minutes to get the pattern down but this is ultimately what motivated me to create NavOverlay.
NavOverlay is an accessibility mobile app that I created to make it easy to swipe and navigate my phone. I create five buttons with lower opacity that always display on screen, so I can quickly press them as needed.
Funny side note: My Switch-It MicroPilot, which is the joystick for my wheelchair, broke while creating this application. Not having a joystick for three days made the app obsolete. Fortunately, I had a spare joystick from another wheelchair that I was able to connect.