Usefulness of mobile information provision systems using graphic text - Visibility of graphic text on mobile phones

Abstract

Textual information can be sent as graphic images without being coded in the broadband digital network. By using graphic text, characters or symbols with unsupported fonts can be displayed. Graphical e-mail systems in mobile phones for sending digital photographs are useful in sending graphic text. We researched the visibility of graphic text on the liquid crystal displays in mobile phones comparing with that of font in the mobile phones, by measuring the variables of reading time and visual distance. We also recorded the number of errors, and subjects evaluated the visibility. Graphic text prepared in the JPEG format had nearly the same visibility of the original font. However, it must be noted that visibility deteriorates as the character size become smaller, and as the user become older. We also mention about the possibility of multilingual disaster information system with mobile phones as an application of the graphic text. Graphic text enables easy display of multilingual information by ordinary types of mobile phones which does not support multilingual characters. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.