A Model for Voice-activated Expression Editing

Code entry and editing by manually disabled computer programmers is difficult in conventional GUI-based development environments, since these rely heavily on mouse and keyboard use. The advent of accurate and responsive speech recognition technologies has made the speech user interface (SUI) a viable option for input. While high level programming constructs can be entered in a fairly natural way us/ing voice, expressions may be very complex in structure, and may use a wide variety of variables, literals, punctuation marks and operator symbols. A SUI-based syntax-directed editor was previously presented, but its interface model did not include expression editing in its model and implementation. This paper fills this gap by presenting a SUI-based model for entering and editing programming language expressions. A Java implementation was evaluated by a group of programmers to verify the functionality and to test the ease of use of the model. The results of this evaluation are presented and discussed.