Development of input assistance application for mobile devices for physically disabled

Physically disabled individuals who have difficulty communicating verbally because of the severity of their symptoms use computers and mobile phones to communicate with others. Individuals who have difficulty handling a mouse or keyboard in the same way a healthy person would can input using devices that combine switches, such as touch sensors with autoscan functions. In Japan, many disabled individuals use the D800iDS, developed by Mitsubishi Electric since 2007, as a mobile phone. However, there have been no plans to sell similar mobile phones, and they are difficult to obtain. Smartphones have been raised as a replacement device candidate, but they still lack sufficient accessibility services. The objective of this research is to develop an Android application that can support alphanumeric input for physically disabled individuals using smartphones. More specifically, we develop an input assistance software keyboard that allows disabled individuals to use their finger to control the device and input alphanumeric characters through a single touch point. We selected an Android device as our target since the system allows the use of widely customizable software keyboards. In this study, we developed a software keyboard, emphasizing on inputting Japanese characters. We initially conceived of a software keyboard with the same form as existing keyboards with autoscan functions, but we determined that this would be difficult to implement owing to Android specifications. Therefore, we modified the specification from a system that converted buttons to one that converted the input object itself. We performed a user experiment using the Android application for Japanese input loaded with autoscan functionality developed in this research. From the results of this experiment, we investigated settings to construct an environment to allow easy input that matches the user´s abilities. We also present indices related to ease of use to examine our experiment results.