The Stroke Dialer is also used as an alternative to the QWERTY keyboard layout in certain Eyes-Free applications such as the Marvin shell. Instead of thinking of the Stoke Dialer as a keypad, think of it as a compass with eight compass points: North, South, East and West, and North-East, North-West, South-East and South-West.
One of the difficulties that people who are blind or vision impaired are faced with when using a touchscreen interface is that there must be some form of feedback to replace the visual cues that are necessary to use a touchscreen. Devices such as the Apple iPhone have resolved this by using text-to-speech technology to announce objects on the interface.
In the words of T.V. Raman, a research scientist at Google and one of the lead developers for Project Eyes-Free:
Project Eyes-Free is “a collection of applications that turn your Android phone into… a completely eyes-free, single-touch, one-handed communication device.”
