Xamobile: Usability Evaluation of Text Input Methods on Mobile Devices for Historical African Languages

Customized text input editors on mobile devices for languages with no standard language models, such as some African languages, are vital to allow text input tasks to be crowdsourced and thus enable quick and precise participation. We investigated 4 different mobile input techniques for complex language scripts like |Xam and collected accuracy data from experiments with the Xwerty, T9, Pinyin script and hierarchical entry methods for mobile devices and also usability data from the participants. Our results on usability testing show that Xwerty methods offer substantial benefits to the majority of users in terms of speed for |Xam text entry and ease of use