Designing a virtual keyboard with multi-modal access for people with disabilities

Author

Prabhu, Vijit ; Prasad, Girijesh

Author_Institution

Comput. Sci. & Eng., Indian Sch. of Mines, Dhanbad, India

fYear

2011

fDate

11-14 Dec. 2011

Firstpage

1133

Lastpage

1138

Abstract

Virtual keyboards or on-screen keyboards are commonly used as a means of augmentative communication by people with severe speech and motion disability. Any such virtual keyboard is characterized by keys´ layout design and method of access. In this paper we present a virtual keyboard that can support multiple modes of access and has an optimum layout based on the frequency of occurrence of alphabet in English text. We have compared our proposed layout against commonly used alphabetical layout, which demonstrates a superior performance of our design.

Keywords

design engineering; handicapped aids; keyboards; access method; alphabet occurrence frequency; alphabetical layout; augmentative communication; key layout design; motion disability; multimodal access; on-screen keyboards; people with disabilities; speech disability; virtual keyboard design; Computers; Educational institutions; Encyclopedias; Keyboards; Layout; Pressing; Testing; Augmentative communication; brain-computer interfacing; eye tracking; scanning and access switches; virtual keyboards;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Information and Communication Technologies (WICT), 2011 World Congress on

Conference_Location

Mumbai

Print_ISBN

978-1-4673-0127-5

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/WICT.2011.6141407

Filename

6141407