Designing a press and swipe type single layered Bangla soft keyboard for Android devices

Development of text entry speed and accuracy is the key concern for designing and evaluating a soft keyboard. Bangla language has large collection of characters and it is hard to design a single layered fixed layout keyboard to provide highperformance in today´s small mobile device. The traditional soft keyboards available in the market are multi-layered and menu based hierarchical keyboard which offer poor text entry speed. This paper describes the design, implementation and evaluation of a fixed layout single layered press and swipe type soft keyboard. Analysis of the comfort zone and movement of fingers, placement of characters and keys based on monograph, implementation on android platform and evaluation comparing with QWERTY keyboard have been described.