Objective comparisons between gesture and exploration based touchscreen keyboards for the blind

Abstract

We report the results of a short term experimental study on blind participants to evaluate their performances on two different text typing techniques. BrailleTouch, a gesture based text typing technology, is objectively compared to the TalkBack-enabled Android stock keyboard which requires touch exploration to type. We found that on an average BrailleTouch was almost twice as fast as the Android stock keyboard for typing each character. At the same time, these experiments clearly establish that accuracy of the BrailleTouch technique significantly dwindles as the number of dots in a Braille cell increase due to lesser motor control over the ring finger (or the digitus medicinalis).