EasySMS App Allows Illiterate People To Read, Compose And Send Text Messages

For you and I the english spoken language comes naturally, reading it, writing it is generally not a problem. However there are some people in the world who do not have the fortune of going to school and getting an education, so for them reading and writing in their own language, not just english, can be quite daunting and near impossible. Which is why this year, during the course of a mobile interaction design class at Lausanne Switzerland’s EPFL, students had to come up with an idea for, and to design an application on mobile phones which will help to improve the livelihoods of people living in rural communities in developing countries, and one of their projects that they came up with was EasySMS.

The group that created the EasySMS application had this to say about their app:

“About 700 million illiterate people in developing countries are currently excluded from the benefits of text messaging. Most of them reside in rural areas in which mobile phone coverage and ownership is growing rapidly and SMS are cheap or even free.

EasySMS application empowers illiterate people to read, compose and send text messages through available text-to-speech solutions to their contacts.

The composition of messages is facilitated through pictograms and previously received messages. Contact identification is aided by visually search-able avatars.

To understand the meaning of each word of the SMSs users receive not only the meaning of the whole message: –> the message is played in a karaoke like style –> each word of the message is a playable button: the user can click on each word to hear it.”