Text Entry Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

2025

The Windows CE graphical keyboard had some features that very few people knew existed, much less used. However, the increased use of graphical keyboards due to the popularity of slates and modern mobile devices makes these features worthy of reexamination. Underlying what follows is the belief that their lack of adoption had more to do with the implementation of the ideas, than with the quality of the ideas themselves. Overall, the ideas enabled the user to access more characters from the basic keyboard, through the use of short-hand strokes, than would otherwise be possible without increasing the number of keys.

2025, Procedia Computer Science

The use of ultra-small smart devices, such as smartwatches, has become increasingly popular, particularly at the consumer level, in recent years. Smartwatch is a kind of interactive device that offers the ability to read text messages, email and notifications, once it is synchronized with a smartphone. But, performing efficient text input task on smartwatch is really difficult due to its small touch screen display. In this paper, we present hall effect sensors based text entry mechanism that effectively uses the 3D space around the smartwatch for entering alphanumeric characters. Our proposed text input technique (a) does not consume any screen space; (b) does not need any visual search to find a character and (c) does not suffer from fat finger problem.

2025, Proceedings - 2005 International Symposium on Collaborative Technologies and Systems

Mobile phones are increasingly being used collaboratively by social networks of users in spite of the fact that they are primarily designed to support single users and one-to-one communication. It is not well understood how services such as group SMS, SMS-based discussion lists and mobile Instant Messaging (IM) will be used by mobile groups in natural settings. Studying specific instances of common styles of in situ, group interaction may provide a way to see behavior patterns and typical interaction problems. We conducted a study of a mobile, group communication probe used during a rendezvousing activity in an urban environment. Usability problems relating to group usage, phone interface design and context were identified. Several major issues included: multitasking during message composition and reading; speed of text entry; excessive demand on visual attention; and ambiguity of intended recipients. We suggest that existing mobile device designs are overlyfocused on individual users to the detriment of usability for mobile groups of users. We provide recommendations for the design of future mobile, group interfaces, used in similar situations to those explored here.

2025, 2016 9th International Conference on Developments in eSystems Engineering (DeSE)

Workplace fatigue increases the risk of injuries and other accidents, thus a growing interest in identifying early detection signs for fatigue has been recently reported in literature. Ubiquity of smartphones opens new opportunities for detecting early signs of fatigue, using daily user activities such as typing, chatting, Internet surfing and track-screen gestures. This paper presents a non-intrusive human fatigue detection method based on smartphone keyboard typing. This is achieved by using a smartphone application that records keystroke events time based on which a new application is developed to identify the user's fatigued/alert status. Text entry error rate, which is considered as a type of psychomotor measures for fatigue/alertness, is utilized as a ground-truth metric in this study. A binary classifier based on a support vector machine classifier is developed to identify the fatigue/alertness status and its performance is assessed experimentally. The obtained results have demonstrated a promising accuracy of 88.8%. This finding is expected to facilitate development of a low-cost and non-intrusive mobile instrument for fatigue/alertness detection.

2025, Proceedings of the ACM on human-computer interaction

With eye-tracking increasingly available in Augmented Reality, we explore how gaze can be used to assist freehand gestural text entry. Here the eyes are often coordinated with manual input across the spatial positions of the keys. Inspired by this, we investigate gaze-assisted selection-based text entry through the concept of spatial alignment of both modalities. Users can enter text by aligning both gaze and manual pointer at each key, as a novel alternative to existing dwell-time or explicit manual triggers. We present a text entry user study comparing two of such alignment techniques to a gaze-only and a manual-only baseline. The results show that one alignment technique reduces physical finger movement by more than half compared to standard in-air finger typing, and is faster and exhibits less perceived eye fatigue than an eyes-only dwell-time technique. We discuss trade-offs between uni and multimodal text entry techniques, pointing to novel ways to integrate eye movements to facilitate virtual text entry. CCS Concepts: • Human-centered computing → Mixed / augmented reality; Pointing; Interaction design theory, concepts and paradigms.

2025, Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction

2025, CHI: Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

Smartwatches have gained a lot of public interest as one of the most popular wearable devices in recent times, but their diminutive touch screens mar the user experiences. The small screen of watch suffers from visual occlusion and the fat finger problem. To address these issues, we present PressTact that extends interaction space beyond the watch surface to the sides of the device. It augments smartwatches with four pressure sensors-two sensors on the left side of a watch and another two on the right side. It enables users to input different levels of pressure that can be used for bi-directional navigation (zooming, scrolling, rotation) on smartwatches. In this paper, we explore the pressure event based input vocabulary set. Our preliminary user study shows that participants can input different pressure levels (light press, medium press, and strong press) in discrete and continuous mode with an acceptable accuracy. Finally, we develop several example applications to illustrate the potential of the proposed technique.

2025, Procedia Computer Science

2025, Human Factors

The objective was to determine the conditions under which Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is an efficient choice for data entry. In particular the focus was on data entry tasks that are part of constructing military messages. The ADF Formatted Messaging System utilises a structured formatting system to constrain the semantics of a message but also includes a field for unlimited and unstructured text. Hence the data entry tasks involved range from formfilling to free dictation of short phrases. In the experiments, ASR and manual input modes are compared for three data entry tasks: textual phrase entry, selection from a list, and numerical data entry. To effect fair comparisons, the tasks minimised the transaction cycle for each input mode and data type and the main comparisons use only times from correct data entry. The results indicate that for inputting short phrases ASR only competes if the typist's speed is below 45wpm. For selecting an item from a list, ASR offered an advantage only if the list length was greater than 15 items. For entering numerical data, ASR offered no advantage over keypad or mouse. The general conclusion for formatted data entry is that a keyboard/mouse interface designed to match the data to be entered will be more time efficient than any equivalent ASR interface.

2025, Human Factors: The Journal of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society

In a series of experiments isolated-word automated speech recognition (ASR) was compared with keyboard and mouse interfaces for three data entry tasks: textual phrase entry, selection from a list, and numerical data entry. To effect fair comparisons, the tasks were designed to minimize the transaction cycle for each input mode and data type, and the main comparisons used times from only correct data entries. With the hardware and software employed the results indicate that for inputting short phrases, ASR competes only if the typist's speed is below 45 words per minute. For selecting an item from a list, ASR offers an advantage only if the list length exceeds 15 items. For entering numerical data, ASR offers no advantage over keypad or mouse. An extrapolation to latency-free ASR suggests that even as hardware and software become faster, human factors will dominate and the results would shift only slightly in favor of ASR.

2025, International Journal of Computer (IJC)

The need for an ergonomic keyboard layout to minimize strain on wrists and fingers during prolonged use has become increasingly important with the proliferation of digital devices. For languages without a standardized keyboard layout, such as Tamazight, makeshift solutions have been used, leading to discomfort and strain on the user's hands and wrists, occasionally resulting in conditions such as repetitive strain injury (RSI) and tendonitis in the wrists. This study presents a novel approach to developing an optimized keyboard layout for Tamazight that focuses on user comfort and minimizes strain on the wrists and fingers. A keyboard stress model was developed in which the keys are classified according to their degree of difficulty and stress, taking into account the position of the keys and the strength and length of the fingers. A textual analysis of novels and songs with over 17,000 words in Tamazight was conducted to determine for the first time the frequency-letter model for the Tamazight language, mainly Kabyle. The frequency of use of each letter was used to distribute them based on the estimated stress level for each finger on the keyboard. The resulting layout minimizes the need for frequent finger switching and includes all the necessary additional keys for Tamazight language use, which is a significant improvement and a major step forward for the standardization of the Tamazight keyboard. The finished layout was implemented with the Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator (MSKLC).

2025

Although Indians represent a sizable market for computers and mobile phones, the technology for typing and displaying text in Indic scripts has lagged far behind the demand. The main hurdles have been (a) the nature of the Indic scripts and (b) the lack of compatibility across software providers. This paper examines three input devices -manual typewriters, computer keyboards, and mobile phone keypads-that have modified existing models for English. It compares these with the technology developed for typing text in Japanese.

2025, Lecture Notes in Computer Science

We present a gestural interface for entering text on a mobile device via continuous movements, with control based on feedback from a probabilistic language model. Text is represented by continuous trajectories over a hexagonal tessellation, and entry becomes a manual control task. The language model is used to infer user intentions and provide predictions about future actions, and the local dynamics adapt to reduce effort in entering probable text. This leads to an interface with a stable layout, aiding user learning, but which appropriately supports the user via the probability model. Experimental results demonstrate that the application of this technique reduces variance in gesture trajectories, and is competitive in terms of throughput for mobile devices. This paper provides a practical example of a user interface making uncertainty explicit to the user, and probabilistic feedback from hypothesised goals has general application in many gestural interfaces, and is well-suited to support multimodal interaction.

2025, Human Factors

The user experience of typing on a smartwatch was evaluated with three unique input methods (tap, trace, and handwriting) while standing and while walking. Background: Despite widespread development within the technology industry, smartwatches have had a relatively slow adoption worldwide compared to smartphones. One limiting factor of smartwatches has been the lack of an efficient means of text entry. The 2017 release of Android Wear addressed this issue by providing support for native text entry (i.e., tap, trace, and handwriting). Determining how user performance and subjective ratings compare across these input methods is essential to understanding their contribution to smartwatch user experience. Method: Twenty college-age individuals typed phrases using tap, trace, and handwriting input on a smartwatch in three different mobility scenarios (standing, walking a simple course, walking a complex course). Results: Participants typed faster with trace (30 words per minute; WPM) than with tap (20 WPM) and handwriting (18 WPM), regardless of mobility. Trace also outperformed tap and handwriting across all subjective metrics, regardless of mobility. Trace input appears to be especially well suited for typing on a smartwatch as it was found to be objectively and subjectively superior to tap and handwriting regardless of user mobility. Objectively, typing speeds with trace are shown to be nearly two times faster than most alternative input methods described in the literature. Application: Results suggest smartwatch manufacturers should include QWERTY keyboards with trace input as a standard feature in order to provide the best overall typing experience for their users.

2025, IEEE Virtual Reality 2004

A new hand-or finger-mounted data input device is presented, using traditional touch-typing skills as method of (alphabetic) character input thus providing an ultra-portable solution for "quiet" data input into portable computer systems. The presented keyboard independent touch-typing device (KITTY) offers high data input rates and a virtually zero learning curve for new users. With recent advances in portable computing and in particular the design of pocket PCs [13] and eye-glass displays [14], the development of new augmented reality (AR) environments has been made possible. However, one of the current shortcomings in these AR systems is the lack of intuitive input devices that provide users with complete control over their workspace. In particular in environments where voice input is undesirable or infeasible, touch-typing capabilities have to be available to allow for intuitive access to possibly complex data.

2025

TiTAN is a spatial user interface that enables freehand, midair text entry with a distant display while only requiring a low-cost depth sensor. Our system aims to leverage one's familiarity with the QWERTY layout. It allows users to input text, in midair, by mimicking the typing action they typically perform on a physical keyboard or touchscreen. Here, both hands and ten fingers are individually tracked, along with click action detection which enables a wide variety of interactions. We propose three midair text entry techniques and evaluate the TiTAN system with two different sensors.

2025, ijcsit.com

Abstract-In this paper we enhance the features of our project and how this project overcomes on other project. In this project we are developing 3 modules viz., Gesture Wizard (GestWiz), RealTouch, TouchWizard (TouchWiz). Today while... more

2024, Digest of Papers. First International Symposium on Wearable Computers

This paper reports on an experiment investigating the functionality and usability of novel input devices on a wearable computer, for text entry tasks. Over a three week period, twelve subjects used three different input devices to create and save short textual messages. The virtual keyboard, forearm keyboard, and Kordic keypad input devices were assessed as to their eficiency and usability for simple text entry tasks. Results collected included the textual data created by the subjects, the duration of activities, the survey data and observations made by supervisors. The results indicated that the forearm keyboard is the best performer for accurate and efJicient text entry while other devices m q benefit from more work on designing specialist CUls for the wearable computer.

2024, Lecture Notes in Computer Science

Standard QWERTY keyboards are considered as a major source of reluctance towards computer usage by Japanese elderly, because of their limited experience with Western typewriters and the high cognitive demand involved in typing Japanese characters with them. This paper discusses the difficulty in typing Japanese characters using QWERTY keyboards, and then introduces two alternative approaches. The first approach makes use of touchscreen and software keyboards. Touchscreen enables users to enter Japanese characters more directly and is expected to moderate their resistance. As the second approach, a trial to develop a mechanical keyboard that is able to change its key layout dynamically is introduced. The proposed keyboard is also capable to change colors of keys, to flash keys to attract users' attention, and to hide unnecessary keys to avoid errors.

2024, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems the CHI is the limit - CHI '99

Using traditional mobile input devices results in decreased effectiveness and efficiency. To improve usability issues a portable Non-Keyboard QWERTY touch-typing paradigm that supports the mobile touch-typing user is presented and investigated. It requires negligible training time. Pressure sensors strapped to the fingertips of gloves detect which finger is depressed. A language model based on lexical and syntactic knowledge transforms the depressed finger stroke sequence into real words and sentences. Different mobile input QWERTY paradigms (miniaturised, floating and Non-Keyboard) have been compared with full-size QWERTY. Among the mobile input paradigms, the Non-Keyboard fared significantly better, both regarding character error rate and subjective ratings.

2024, Proceedings of the 16th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology

Although graphical user interfaces started as imitations of the physical world, many interaction techniques have since been invented that are not available in the real world. This paper focuses on one of these "previewing", and how a sensory enhanced input device called "PreSense Keypad" can provide a preview for users before they actually execute the commands. Preview important in the real world because it is often not possible to undo an action. This previewable feature helps users to see what will occur next. It is also helpful when the command assignment of the keypad dynamically changes, such as for universal commanders. We present several interaction techniques based on this input device, including menu and map browsing systems and a text input system. We also discuss finger gesture recognition for the PreSense Keypad.

2024, Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

Nonspeaking individuals with motor disabilities typically have very low communication rates. This paper proposes a design engineering approach for quantitatively exploring contextaware sentence retrieval as a promising complementary input interface, working in tandem with a word-prediction keyboard. We motivate the need for complementary design engineering methodology in the design of augmentative and alternative communication and explain how such methods can be used to gain additional design insights. We then study the theoretical performance envelopes of a context-aware sentence retrieval system, identifying potential keystroke savings as a function of the parameters of the subsystems, such as the accuracy of the underlying auto-complete word prediction algorithm and the accuracy of sensed context information under varying assumptions. We find that context-aware sentence retrieval has the potential to provide users with considerable improvements in keystroke savings under reasonable parameter assumptions of the underlying subsystems. This highlights how complementary design engineering methods can reveal additional insights into design for augmentative and alternative communication.

2024

It is well documented that people with severe speech and physical impairments (SSPI) often experience literacy difficulties, which hinder them from effectively using orthographicbased AAC systems for communication. To address this problem, phoneme-based AAC systems have been proposed, which enable users to access a set of spoken phonemes and combine phonemes into speech output. In this paper we investigate how prediction techniques can be applied to improve user performance of such systems. We have developed a phoneme-based prediction system, which supports single phoneme prediction and phoneme-based word prediction using statistical language models generated using a crowdsourced AAC-like corpus. We incorporated our prediction system into a hypothetical 12-key reduced phoneme keyboard. A computational experiment showed that our prediction system led to 56.3% average keystroke savings. 4.2.1 Keystroke Savings Keystroke Savings (KS) is defined as the percentage of keystrokes that the user saves by using prediction methods compared to using the MULTITAP method:

2024, 2016 9th International Conference on Developments in eSystems Engineering (DeSE)

2024, Proceedings of the 16th international ACM SIGACCESS conference on Computers & accessibility - ASSETS '14

Phoneme-based text entry provides an alternative typing method for nonspeaking individuals who often experience difficulties in orthographic spelling. In this paper, we investigate the application of rate enhancement strategies to improve the user performance of phoneme-based text entry systems. We have developed a phoneme-based predictive typing system, which employs statistical language modeling techniques to dynamically reduce the phoneme search space and offer accurate word predictions. Results of a case study with a nonspeaking participant demonstrated that our rate enhancement strategies led to improved text entry speed and error rates.

2024, International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence

Brain-computer interfaces, as any other interaction modality based on physiological signals and body channels (e.g., muscular activity, speech and gestures), are prone to errors in the recognition of subject's intent. In this paper we exploit a unique feature of the "brain channel", namely that it carries information about cognitive states that are crucial for a purposeful interaction. One of these states is the awareness of erroneous responses. Different physiological studies have shown the presence of error-related potentials (ErrP) in the EEG recorded right after people get aware they have made an error. However, for human-computer interaction, the central question is whether ErrP are also elicited when the error is made by the interface during the recognition of the subject's intent and no longer by errors of the subject himself. In this paper we report experimental results with three volunteer subjects during a simple human-robot interaction (i.e., bringing the robot to either the left or right side of a room) that seem to reveal a new kind of ErrP, which is satisfactorily recognized in single trials. These recognition rates significantly improve the performance of the brain interface.

2024, Insights into imaging

To determine why, despite growing evidence that radiologists and referring physicians prefer structured reporting (SR) to free text (FT) reporting, SR has not been widely adopted in most radiology departments. A focus group was formed consisting of 11 radiology professionals from eight countries. Eight topics were submitted for discussion. The meeting was videotaped, transcribed, and analyzed according to the principles of qualitative healthcare research. Perceived advantages of SR were facilitation of research, easy comparison, discouragement of ambiguous reports, embedded links to images, highlighting important findings, not having to dictate text nobody will read, and automatic translation of teleradiology reports. Being compelled to report within a rigid frame was judged unacceptable. Personal convictions appeared to have high emotional value. It was felt that other healthcare stakeholders would impose SR without regard to what radiologists thought of it. If the industry were to...

2024, Proceedings of the Third IASTED

Understanding users’ mental models can improve design
and testing of interactive systems. Yet, the extraction of
users’ mental models and their representation are still a
tough challenge. We addressed this question by focusing
on how the depth/breadth tradeoff in web navigation
structures is reflected in users’ mental models. The
approach presented here is based on gathering the data in
an unlimited-hierarchy variation of card sorting technique
and analyzing the results using hierarchic cluster analysis
visualized with dendograms. We report a pilot study of
our approach and compare the hierarchic cluster analysis
and dendograms with ANOVA. The findings show
significantly different perceptions of breadth versus depth
in two different devices, a desktop computer and cellular
phone. These findings are in contrast with findings of
more traditional mental model assessment approaches,
thus validating the necessity and the usefulness of the
purposed new approach.

2024, CHI EA '24: Extended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

Scale questionnaires are psychometric tools that capture perspectives and experiences. Consequently, these tools need to be reliable and valid. In this paper, we investigate the impact of response widgets - the UI elements that allow users to answer scale items - on the overall scale reliability and construct validity of three varied length scale questionnaires in a user study (N=30). Our results reveal that optimum reliability was achieved using radio buttons and dropdowns in all varied-length questionnaires. Further, valid results were produced utilising the slider and dropdown. No significant differences were found in time consumption, but click count was significantly higher with dropdown. Radio buttons scored lower in format satisfaction than others, and dropdown was the least effective in ease of selection and quick completion. In light of these results, we conclude that response widgets are more than just aesthetics and should be selected as per the researcher’s aims.

2024, Lecture Notes in Computer Science

Recently touch screens are widely used for mobile devices to provide intuitive and natural interactions with fingertips. However, the lack of tactile feedback makes it difficult for users to receive key-click confirmation during text entry on soft keyboards. This paper examines the effect of tactile feedback on typing performance with the soft QWERTY keyboard: the most commonly used multifinger text entry method on tablet devices. We implemented tactile feedback hardware and software to simulate the key-click effect on a commerciallyavailable mobile tablet (Microsoft Surface Pro). We conducted a typing experiment to measure user performance and preference. The participants transcribed given phrases under three sensory feedback conditions: visual only, visual and audio, and visual and tactile. The results are unexpected; we did not find any significant difference in terms of typing performance, and user preference was as positive as the audio condition though better received than the visual only condition. This study thus reports different findings from previous work studying text entry on handheld devices, encouraging further examinations to fully understand the effect of tactile feedback on text entry in tablet devices.

2024

Mobile touch devices have become increasingly popular, yet typing on virtual keyboards whilst walking is still an overwhelming task. In this paper we analyze; firstly, the negative effect of walking on text-input performance, particularly the users' main difficulties and error patterns. We focused our research on thumb typing, since this is a commonly used technique to interact with touch interfaces. Secondly, we analyze how these effects can be compensated by two-hand interaction and increasing target size. We asked 22 participants to input text under three mobility conditions (seated, slow walking, and normal walking) and three hand conditions (one-hand/portrait, twohand/portrait, and two-hand/landscape). Results show that independently of hand condition, mobility significantly decreased input quality, leading to specific error patterns. Moreover, it was shown that target size can compensate the negative effect of walking, while two-hand interaction does not provide additional stability or input accuracy. We finish with implications for future designs.

2024

NavTap is a navigational method that enables blind users to input text in a mobile device by reducing the associated cognitive load. In this paper, we present studies that go beyond a laboratorial setting, exploring the methods' ef fectiveness and learnability as well as its influence in the users' daily lives. Eight blind users participated in the pro totype's design (3 weeks) while five took part in the studies along 16 more weeks. All were unable to input text before. Results gathered in controlled weekly sessions and real life interaction logs enabled us to better understand NavTap's advantages and limitations. The method revealed itself as easy to learn and improve, as the users were able to fully control their mobile devices in the first contact within a real life scenario. The users' individual profiles play an impor tant role determining their evolution and, even less capable users (with age-induced impairments or cognitive difficul ties), were able to perform the required tasks, both in and out of the laboratory, with continuous improvements. Nav-Tap dramatically changed the users' relation with mobile devices and improved their social interaction capabilities.

2024

Touchscreen devices have become increasingly popular. Yet they lack of tactile feedback and motor stability, making it difficult effectively typing on virtual keyboards. This is even worse for elderly users and their declining motor abilities, particularly hand tremor. In this paper we examine text-entry performance and typing patterns of elderly users on touch-based devices. Moreover, we analyze users' hand tremor profile and its relationship to typing behavior. Our main goal is to inform future designs of touchscreen keyboards for elderly people. To this end, we asked 15 users to enter text under two device conditions (mobile and tablet) and measured their performance, both speedand accuracy-wise. Additionally, we thoroughly analyze different types of errors (insertions, substitutions, and omissions) looking at touch input features and their main causes. Results show that omissions are the most common error type, mainly due to cognitive errors, followed by substitutions and insertions. While tablet devices can compensate for about 9% of typing errors, omissions are similar across conditions. Measured hand tremor largely correlates with text-entry errors, suggesting that it should be approached to improve input accuracy. Finally, we assess the effect of simple touch models and provide implications to design.

2024

Speech recognition technologies have come a long way in the past generation. Indeed, they are becoming ever more pervasive in our day-to-day lives, especially in the form of voice-activated menus so prevalent in many automated answering systems. However, speech technologies are still of limi ted usefulness for large-vocabulary speaker-independent applications in noisy environments, especially where relatively limited computing resources are available as in present-day personal digital assistants (PDAs). Given the popularity of digital cellular phones and text-messaging systems, we describe a generic interface that can be used by any application that need text input by visually-impaired users on this kind of devices. Given the shortcomings of present-day speech recognition technology, we opted to develop three types ofkeyboards, two predictive, with vocalfeedback. This paper, describes the interface development and the usability evalualion results with target users. Our prototype tes...

2024

Recent advances on mobile technologies are blurring the frontiers between able-bodied and disabled users. Indeed, mobile settings have a negative impact on motor abilities. Mobile users' bodies are prone to vibrations, resulting in hand tremors, which hinder target selection accuracy. These users seem to share some problems with elderly people, who experience increased physiological tremor. However, this hypothesis has yet to be thoroughly researched. In this work, we propose to bridge the gap between different domains, allowing designers to build more inclusive and comprehensive solutions using recent touch-based devices. We present two evaluations comparing situational-to health-impaired users and report on the main differences and similarities we found on text-entry tasks. Our results show that while elderly users are more likely to commit cognitive errors, both user groups experience similar substitution errors. We found that the increased demands of mobility and type of device seemingly induce a "disability continuum", where both situationally-and health-impaired users' performance is interleaved.

2024, Lecture Notes in Computer Science

Nowadays, it is common for users to handle large numbers of documents. Organizing and retrieving those documents is extremely difficult using the tools commonly provided for those tasks. The use of document-describing narratives constitutes an alternate, easier way of allowing the users to do so. Narratives can help them remember important information about documents and are a natural way to convey that information to computers. In order to develop this approach, it is necessary to understand what shape do documentdescribing stories have. To this end we interviewed 20 users and collected 60 stories about documents. Analyzing these stories yielded a thorough characterization of their contents and structure and to extract guidelines on how to deal with them. We then validated those results by creating and evaluating two lowfidelity prototypes for possible story-capturing interfaces. We found that stories told to computers can be very similar to those told to humans, if the interface is properly designed. These results seem to suggest that structured text entry is a promising design for this interface.

2024, Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings

2024, ASSETS'12 - Proceedings of the 14th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility

2024, Lecture Notes in Computer Science

We present a new mobile text-entry method that relies on alphabet navigation and dismisses memorizing, offering visually impaired individuals an easy writing mechanism. Current mobile text-entry interfaces are not suitable for blind users and special braille devices are too heavy, large and cumbersome to be used in a mobile context. With the enormous growth of mobile communications and applications it was urgent to offer visually impaired individuals the ability to operate this kind of devices. Evaluation studies were carried and validated the navigation method as a new mobile text-entry interface for the target population.

2024, Proceedings of the 15th European conference on Cognitive ergonomics: the ergonomics of cool interaction

Motivation-To provide suitable mobile text-entry interfaces for the disabled, designed considering their capabilities and needs. Research approach-We analyzed 20 blind users and the difficulties they face with traditional text-entry approaches. We designed a new text-entry method, modelled accordingly to the design guidelines retrieved from the user studies and evaluated in comparison to the traditional approach through user evaluation. The navigation model presented shows to be effective both on keypad and touch screen based devices. Findings/Design-Results show that if the user's limitations and capacities are taken into account, the first approach with the mobile device is subtle and the learning curve is accentuated. In opposite to traditional approaches, the theoretical values are likely to be achieved. Research limitations/Implications-As the available set of target users is limited, the user studies were made with five users per group (3 groups/15 users). Originality/Value-The research presents an innovative text-entry method and its comparison with commonly used methods. We also present a solution to provide text input in touch screen mobile devices for blind users. Take away message-If the interaction is designed with the end users in mind, the best theoretical values are likely to be achieved.

2024, CHI '04 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems

The documents users must handle are growing both in number and diversity. However, the ways of organizing and retrieving them remain largely unchanged. Given the innate human ability to tell stories, the use of narratives can be a natural and effective way to retrieve documents. To better understand how narratives can be used in this context, a thorough characterization of their contents and structure was obtained from several interviews. Then, the results were validated by the evaluation of low fidelity prototypes for story-capture interfaces, allowing us to verify that stories are valid as document-retrieval tools, and the shape those interfaces should take (structured text entry).

2024, Lecture Notes in Computer Science

The emergence of touch screen devices poses a new set of challenges regarding text-entry. These are more obvious when considering blind people, as touch screens lack the tactile feedback they are used to when interacting with devices. The available solutions to enable non-visual text-entry resort to a wide set of targets, complex interaction techniques or unfamiliar layouts. We propose BrailleType, a text-entry method based on the Braille alphabet. BrailleType avoids multi-touch gestures in favor of a more simple single-finger interaction, featuring few and large targets. We performed a user study with fifteen blind subjects, to assess this method's performance against Apple's VoiceOver approach. BrailleType although slower, was significantly easier and less error prone. Results suggest that the target users would have a smoother adaptation to BrailleType than to other more complex methods.

2024, Proceedings of the 11th international ACM SIGACCESS conference on Computers and accessibility

2024, The proceedings of the 13th international ACM SIGACCESS conference on Computers and accessibility

The emergence of touch-based mobile devices brought fresh and exciting possibilities. These came at the cost of a considerable number of novel challenges. They are particularly apparent with the blind population, as these devices lack tactile cues and are extremely visually demanding. Existing solutions resort to assistive screen reading software to compensate the lack of sight, still not all the information reaches the blind user. Good spatial ability is still required to have notion of the device and its interface, as well as the need to memorize buttons" position on screen. These abilities, as many other individual attributes as age, age of blindness onset or tactile sensibility are often forgotten, as the blind population is presented with the same methods ignoring capabilities and needs. Herein, we present a study with 13 blind people consisting of a touch screen text-entry task with four different methods. Results show that different capability levels have significant impact on performance and that this impact is related with the different methods" demands. These variances acknowledge the need of accounting for individual characteristics and giving space for difference, towards inclusive design.

2024, Proceedings of the 28th Annual European Conference on Cognitive Ergonomics

Motivation-Understand how NavTap, an assistive text-entry method, stands in relation to traditional approaches. Research approach-We performed a betweensubjects text-entry study with 12 blind users proficient with MultiTap and five blind users proficient with NavTap. Participants were asked to input ten sentences with different length and complexity. Findings/Design-MultiTap significantly outperformed NavTap when considering text entry speed, confirming its theoretical advantage. However, when considering method effectiveness, NavTap's less experienced participants committed significantly fewer errors, indicating that it is both easier to learn and use, reaffirming it is an alternative for those unable to adjust to demanding adaptations. Research limitations/Implications-Before NavTap appeared its users were unable to input text in a mobile device. Indeed, existing data make it difficult to assess differences between the users of either method. Further, NavTap users had less experience using the method (four months) than MultiTap (years). Originality/Value-We contribute to understanding the limitations and merits of different text-entry approaches for blind people, after extensive usage. Take away message-Different methods have different limitations and values. Selecting a match for a particular user may depend on his individual differences.

2024, Universal Access in the Information Society

Mobile devices are increasingly used for text entry in contexts where visual attention is fragmented and graphical information is inadequate, yet the current solutions to typing on virtual keyboards make it a visually-demanding task. This work looks at assistive technologies and interface attributes as tools to ease the task. Methods: We performed two within-subject experiments with 23 and 17 participants, respectively. The first experiment was to understand how walking affected text-entry performance and additionally to assess how effective assistive technologies can be in mobile contexts. On the second experiment, we developed and evaluated adaptive keyboards featuring character prediction and pre-attentive attributes to ease visual demands of text-entry interfaces. Results: We found both text-input speed and overall quality to be affected in mobile situations. Contrary to our expectations, assistive technologies proved ineffective with visual feedback. The second experiment showed that pre-attentive attributes do not affect users' performance on taskentry tasks, even though we measured a 3.3-4.3% decrease on Error Rates. Conclusions: We found that users reduce walking speed to compensate challenges placed by mobile text-entry. Caution should be exercised when transferring assistive technologies to mobile contexts, since they need adaptations to address mobile users' needs. Also, while pre-attentive attributes seemingly have no effect on experienced QWERTY typists' performance, they showed promise for both novice users and typists in attention-demanding contexts.

2024

Abstract. Touch screen mobile devices are highly flexible and customizable, allowing designers to create inclusive user interfaces that are accessible to a broader user population. However, the knowledge to provide this new generation of user interfaces is yet to be uncovered. Our goal is to thoroughly study mobile touch interfaces, thus providing the tools for informed design. We present an evaluation performed with 15 tetraplegic and 18 able-bodied people that allowed us to identify their main similarities and differences within ...

2024

1—We present a new mobile text-entry method that relies on the Braille alphabet and dismisses memorizing, offering visually impaired individuals an easy writing mechanism. Current mobile text-entry interfaces are not suitable for blind users and special Braille devices are too heavy, large and cumbersome to be used in a mobile context. With the enormous growth of mobile communications and applications it was urgent to offer visually impaired individuals the ability to operate this kind of devices. Evaluation studies ...

2024

There is no such thing as an ultimate text-entry method. People are diverse and mobile touch typing takes place in many different places and scenarios. This translates to a wide and dynamic diversity of abilities. Conversely, different methods present different demands and are adequate to different people/situations. In this paper we focus our attention on blind and situationally blind people; how abilities differ between people and situations, and how we can cope with those differences either by varying or adapting ...