TapStr: A Tap and Stroke Reduced-Qwerty for Smartphones

Abstract

Figure 1: TapStr is an unambiguous reduced-Qwerty that maps the standard Qwerty in a single row divided into four zones. Tapping on a zone enters the central character and stroking on a zone towards one of the eight characters around the border enters the respective character. Dwelling for 500 ms upon a tap or stroke enters the uppercase letters or the secondary characters, distinguished using a smaller font (right). Dwelling for 1000 ms activates or deactivates Caps Lock. Stroking towards '↙' switches the layout for numeric and special characters (right) and stroking towards ' ' switches the layout for emojis.