Enhancing digital inclusion with an English pseudo-syllabic keyboard

Abstract

The capability to efficiently input texts with hardware or soft keyboards is a major achievement to improve the digital inclusion of motor-impaired users in the modern ICT world. One way to obtain this capability is the use of multi-character keyboards that make it possible to significantly reduce the number of selected keystrokes. To this aim, in this paper we propose the orthogonal pseudo-syllabic layout for an English keyboard with high keystroke savings. Since English is characterised by a large number of frequent monosyllabic words, the careful design of the consonant and vowel graphemes that compose the pseudo-syllables makes it possible to directly select the most frequent multi-character units of the language. Therefore, the frequency statistics of English have been carefully analysed to select a suitable set of pseudo-syllables and to choose their placement on the orthogonal layout. The keyboard layout has then been tested with the automatic acquisition of a set of English texts. The obtained keystroke savings are comparable with those obtained with other languages which, in contrast with English, are characterised by very regular orthographies. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.