It's life Jim, but not as we know it

Question:

How do you build a Touch screen application, on a device with no keyboard, for someone who has limited sight or just cannot look at the screen (they are driving) ?

I was fortunate enough to attend Google IO last week. (each year it just gets better and better - if you missed it - put it on your calendar for next year). Amongst some of the great sessions I attended was one that deals with two of my most favourite subjects - user interaction and voice technology. Presented by TV Raman and Charles L. Chen - they discuss the Eyes-Free Project : a project that aims to enable fluent eyes-free use of mobile devices running Android. Target uses range from eyes-busy environments like in-car use to users who can't or don't want to look at the visual display. When you watch the video you will see some of the UI innovations for taking advantage of the touch screen without needing to actually look at the screen.

You can download the applications to your Android phone. It's great to see such innovation around user interactivity - especially on a mobile device. The mobile device has the ability to sense more about it's environment than your PC can - so go ahead, watch the video and really make the most of these great new computing platforms.
Download the presentation here

This is a little embarrassing really - because there is nothing that you need to do to get Siebel running on the Android device. Just fire up your browser.... That's the beauty of using standards. It's taken a while for me to showcase this (OK - a year...) - but I took some time out this afternoon to record the "out-of-the-box" experience. Just fire up an instance of Siebel Sales (Wireless) and point the browser on the Android device to the URL. No problems whatsoever, as you can see on the video below.

Clearly there's some work to be done to make use of the real estate (the out of the box app is styled on windows mobile devices... but it's just standard web stuff and CSS)

OK - Android this week. Palm Pre and iPhone 3 next week. So many great gadgets to choose from!! Don't you just love competition?

I have finally managed to squeeze some time in to record the audio for a presentation I gave earlier this year. It's posted up on slideshare,net but included here for your convenience.
I would say that most of the advice is not rocket science and probably something you have been thinking about yourself. Well - here is the stimulus to go and do something about it.