Pickup usability dominates: a brief history of mobile text entry research and adoption

Text entry on mobile devices (e.g. phones and PDAs) has been a research challenge since devices shrank below laptop size: mobile devices are simply too small to have a traditional full-size keyboard. There has been a profusion of research into text entry techniques for smaller keyboards and touch screens: some of which have become mainstream, while others have not lived up to early expectations. As the mobile phone industry moves to mainstream touch screen interaction we will review the range of input techniques for mobiles, together with evaluations that have taken place to assess their validity: from theoretical modelling through to formal usability experiments. We also report initial results on iPhone text entry speed

Investigating five key predictive text entry with combined distance and keystroke modelling

This paper investigates text entry on mobile devices using only five-keys. Primarily to support text entry on smaller devices than mobile phones, this method can also be used to maximise screen space on mobile phones. Reported combined Fitt's law and keystroke modelling predicts similar performance with bigram prediction using a five-key keypad as is currently achieved on standard mobile phones using unigram prediction. User studies reported here show similar user performance on five-key pads as found elsewhere for novice nine-key pad users

OpenAdaptxt: an open source enabling technology for high quality text entry

Modern text entry systems, especially for touch screen phones and novel devices, rely on complex underlying technologies such as error correction and word suggestion. Furthermore, for global deployment a vast number of languages have to be supported. Together this has raised the entry bar for new text entry techniques, which makes developing and testing a longer process thus stifling innovation. For example, testing a new feedback mechanism in comparison to a stock keyboard now requires the researchers to support at least slip correction and probably word suggestion. This paper introduces OpenAdaptxt: an open source community driven text input platform to enable development of higher quality text input solutions. It is the first commercial-grade open source enabling technology for modern text entry that supports both multiple platforms and dictionary support for over 50 spoken languages

Inline Text Entry On Portable Electronic Devices

This publication describes systems and techniques to provide inline text entry on portable electronic devices. Portable electronic devices, such as smartphones, generally include an on-screen keyboard to allow users to input alphanumeric characters. These keyboards generally provide several suggestions of the word that the user is currently typing or the next word to be input. Because the keyboard has a limited area on the graphical user interface (GUI) to display candidate words, the keyboard can only present a few suggestions (e.g., two or three candidates), which are generally single-word candidates. This publication describes a keyboard for portable electronic devices that displays inline candidate words, which can include multiple words, entire phrases, and complete sentences. The inline suggestions can be shown directly in the editor box of an application or a pop-up window. The inline suggestions allow users to type faster and reduce spelling and grammatical errors in applications on portable electronic devices

A Thumb Stroke-Based Virtual Keyboard for Sight-Free Text Entry on Touch-Screen Mobile Phones

The use of QWERTY on most of the current mobile devices for text entry usually requires users’ full visual attention and both hands, which is not always possible due to situational or physical impairments of users. Prior research has shown that users prefer to hold and interact with a mobile device with a single hand when possible, which is challenging and poorly supported by current mobile devices. We propose a novel thumb-stroke based keyboard called ThumbStroke, which can support both sight-free and one-handed text entry on touch-screen mobile devices. Selecting a character for text entry via ThumbStroke completely relies on the directions of thumb movements at anywhere on a device screen. We evaluated ThumbStroke through a longitudinal lab experiment including 20 sessions with 13 participants. ThumbStroke shows advantages in typing accuracy and user perceptions in comparison to Escape and QWERTY and results in faster typing speed than QWERTY for sight-free text entry

Survey of Eye-Free Text Entry Techniques of Touch Screen Mobile Devices Designed for Visually Impaired Users

Now a days touch screen mobiles are becoming more popular amongst sighted as well visually impaired people due to its simple interface and efficient interaction techniques. Most of the touch screen devices designed for visually impaired users based on screen readers, haptic and different user interface (UI).In this paper we present a critical review of different keypad layouts designed for visually impaired users and their effect on text entry speed. And try to list out key issues to extend accessibility and text entry rate of touch screen devices.Keywords: Text entry rate, touch screen mobile devices, visually impaired users

Inviscid text entry and beyond

The primary focus of our workshop is on exploring ways to enable inviscid text entry on mobile devices. In inviscid text entry, it is the user's creativity that is the text-creation bottleneck rather than the text entry interface. The inviscid rate is estimated at 67 wpm while current mobile text entry methods are typically 20-40 wpm. In this workshop, participants will discuss and demonstrate early work into novel methods that allow very rapid text entry, even if such methods currently are quite error-prone. In addition to submitting a position paper, participants are strongly encouraged to bring a demo to present during the workshop's interactive Show-and-Tell session. As well as exploring new entry methods, the workshop will discuss experimental tasks and evaluation methodologies for researching inviscid text entry. Looking beyond the speed of entry, the workshop will explore often overlooked aspects of text entry such as user adaptation, post-entry correction/revision/formatting, entry of diverse types of text, and entry when a user's input or output capabilities are limited. Finally, the workshop serves to strengthen the community of text entry researchers who attend CHI, as well as provide an opportunity for new members to join this community