MobiCentraList: Software keyboard with predictive list for mobile device

Abstract

Software keyboards were designed to provide accessibility to mobile users as well as to people with motor disability. Text entry is henceforth made possible on portable devices such as mobile phones, tablets, pads. Despite their obvious utility, these keyboards present major drawbacks in terms of speed of acquisition and induced fatigue comparatively to conventional physical keyboards. Optimization efforts have showed efficacy by adding prediction lists and dictionaries. Other researches have considered the effect of the position of characters and the prediction list relatively to the time of acquisition and performance. Those researches were designed for computer software keyboards. In this paper, the position of the prediction list is investigated on a mobile device. The “MobiCentraList” is the mobile version of a previous computer software keyboard “Centralist” which was developed for this purpose. The position effect of the prediction list is studied and compared to natural software keyboards.