Virtual keyboard design: State of the arts and research issues

Recent advancement in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) open up a scope for computing in Indian languages. Off late, computing devices are evolved in different shapes like cell phone, PDA, iPod etc. In these devices, it is not possible to afford hardware keyboard because of the limitations in size and weight of devices. To alleviate this problem, application developers propose virtual keyboard. The virtual is an on screen graphics keyboard and is flexible to compare with its hardware keyboard counterpart. There are many reported strategies towards the development of virtual keyboards in English language, but those well known strategies are not properly applicable for virtual keyboard design in Indian languages. In this paper, we survey the existing strategies and critically examine their applicability to design virtual keyboard in Indian languages. We then propose an approach to design any Indian language compatible virtual keyboard.