SwingBoard: introducing swipe based virtual keyboard for visually impaired and blind users

Abstract

Purpose

Nowadays, typing is considered as one of the highly important aspects of accessibility that the visually impaired and blinds struggle with the most as existing virtual keyboards are complex and slow.

Materials and methods

This paper proposes a new text entry method named SwingBoard for visually impaired and blind smartphone users to solve their accessibility problem. It supports a–z, 0–9, 7 punctuations, 12 symbols, and eight keyboard functionalities that are arranged in 8 zones (specific range of angles), four segments, two modes, and different gestures. The proposed keyboard is suitable for the either single-handed or both-handed operation that tracks swipe angle and length to trigger any of the 66 key events. The key triggering process is based on only swiping the finger at different angles with different lengths. Typing speed of SwingBoard is increased by including some effective features such as the quick alphabet and number mode shifting, haptic feedback feature, talkback on swipe to learn the map quickly, and customizable swipe length feature.

Results

At the end of 150 one-minute tests, seven blind participants reached an average of 19.89 words per minute (WPM) with an 88% accuracy rate which is one of the fastest-ever recorded average typing speeds for the blind.

Conclusion

Almost all users found SwingBoard effective, easy to learn and want to keep using it. SwingBoard is a handy virtual keyboard for visually impaired people with amazing typing speed and accuracy.

IMPLICATIONS FOR REHABILITATION

• Rehabilitation would be easier for a visually impaired/disabled person who can adapt the current technology-oriented world and use communication tools easily.

• As visually impaired and blind people faced a lot of problems in their regular life because of their inability to see things, coping with the evolving world’s demands from a person to do a certain task using smart devices would be easier for them with the proposed virtual keyboard topology.

• As the number of visually impaired and blind users of smartphones rises, faster typing becomes a vital aspect of the smartphone experience.

• Deaf-blind communities are expanding but solutions for them are not increasing at the same pace because of the limitation of implication. Research on a virtual keyboard with the proposed eyes-free swipe-based typing operation and ears-free reliability on haptic feedback would enable others to create new solutions.

Keywords:

• Accessibility
• text entry
• keyboard
• visually impaired
• blind
• touchscreen
• gesture

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

No external funding is received for conducting this research.