This paper describes the development of a new technique for touchscreen interaction, based on a single gesture-driven adaptive software button. The button is intended to substitute the software keyboard, and provides text-entry functionality. Input is accomplished through recognition of finger gestures that is comprised of movement towards the eight basic directions in any position. The target user group of such an interaction technique is primarily blind people who could benefit significantly. The adaptability of the button provides complementary help and follows the style of interaction in a natural way. The analysis of the results, collected from twelve blindfolded subjects, revealed an encouraging tendency. During blind manipulation on touch screen, three of the subjects achieved a maximal typing speed of about 12 wpm after five trials. This suggests that the technique developed is reliable and robust enough to be possibly applied to diverse application platforms, including personal device assistants.
Haptic feedback based on the sense of touch and movement is a promising area of human-computer interaction in the car context. Most user studies on haptic feedback in the car have been controlled experiments of specific types of haptic stimuli. For the study presented in this paper, twelve participants tried novel haptic feedback prototypes and evaluated communication scenarios in the physical car context. Our aim was to understand user experiences and usage potential of haptic feedback in the car. The qualitative results show that haptic feedback may offer support for safety and social communication, but can be hard to interpret. We propose design considerations for incar haptics such as simplicity, subtleness and directionality.
Blind and visually impaired students need special educational and developmental tools to allow them to interact with graphic entities on PDA and desktop platforms. In previous research, stylus movements regarding the hidden graph were sonified with three directionalpredictive sound (DPS) signals, taking into account an exploration behavior and the concept of the capture radius. The results indicated that the scanpaths were by 24-40% shorter in length and task completion times decreased by 20-25%. The goal of the study presented in this paper was to measure and compare the subjective performance recorded with directional-predictive vibrations (DPV) regarding the subjective performance achieved when the hidden graphic images were explored with DPS. The study also aimed to find out which kind of feedback cues would require less cognitive efforts in interpreting their meaning. The prototype of vibro-tactile pen with embedded vibration motor was used to produce DPV instead of sounds. The performance of eight blindfolded subjects was investigated in terms of the number of both feedbacks used and the time spent to complete non-visual inspection of the hidden graphs. There was a statistically significant difference between the average number of DPS and vibrations and task completion time taken by the players to discover the features of hidden graphs being explored with different capture radius. The experimental findings confirmed the beneficial use of DPS signals in the task when cross-modal coordination should benefit the user in the absence of visual information when compared with DPV patterns.
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