A comparison of two computer access systems for functional text entry.

Editorial: Introduction to Special Section on Evidence-Based Practices for Persons With Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities

We introduce the concept of the inviscid text entry rate: the point when the user's creativity is the bottleneck rather than the text entry method. We then apply the inviscid text entry rate to define a grand goal for mobile text entry. Via a proxy measure we estimate the population mean of the sufficiently inviscid entry rate to be 67 wpm. We then compare existing mobile text entry methods against this estimate and find that the vast majority of text entry methods in the literature are substantially slower. This analysis suggests the mobile text entry field needs to focus on methods that can viably approach the inviscid entry rate.

Background: Evidence-based practice (EBP) in seating and wheeled mobility practice is often hindered by a dearth of published research.Purpose: The purpose of this review was to explore and critically appraise the use of single-subject research designs (SSRDs) in seating and wheeled mobility studies published between January 1995 and May 2018.Study Selection: Primary source, peer-reviewed SSRDs focused on exploring the impact of a seating and wheeled mobility intervention were included in the review.Data Extraction: Relevant data extraction, determination of level of evidence, evaluation of methodological rigor, and assessment of the risk of bias were each independently performed.Data Synthesis: The review yielded 19 studies (2 Level III, 15 Level IV, and 2 Level V). A majority of these studies incorporated a withdrawal-type of SSRD and involved subjects representing patient populations with seating and wheeled mobility needs. Methodological rigor/quality features most commonly absent in the included studies included: blinding/masking, inter-rater or intra-rater reliability, >5 data points in each phase, planned replication (≥3 subjects), procedural fidelity methods, randomization, stability of the data during baseline, statistical analyses and use of subject selection criteria. The limited number of published SSRDs, combined with the lower levels of evidence (Levels III–V) provided by these studies, indicates that the use of SSRDs in seating and wheeled mobility research is in the early stages of development.Conclusions: Increasing the methodological quality and rigor as well as reporting methods in future SSRDs involving seating and wheeled mobility interventions may help to support EBP in this area.Implications for RehabilitationSingle-subject research designs (SSRDs) offer both researchers and clinicians the opportunity to contribute to the existing knowledge base in ways that reflect actual clinical practice.SSRDs provide flexibility in adapting and modifying seating and wheeled mobility-related assistive technology devices to meet the individual needs of specific subjects.SSRDs preserve individual responses to seating and wheeled mobility-related assistive technology devices.SSRDs may help to enhance evidence-based practice (EBP) in seating and wheeled mobility practice by spanning the divide between research and practice.Increasing the methodological quality and rigor as well as reporting methods in future SSRDs may help to support EBP in seating and wheeled mobility practice.

Of late, many text entry systems in users' languages with various text entry rate enhancement strategies are being proposed. To evaluate the effectiveness of such text entry systems, measuring error correction efficiency in addition to text entry rate have been advocated by researcher. Existing metrics for evaluating text entry errors are found inaccurate to evaluate text entry systems augmented with word prediction. This work attempts to bridge this gap. In this work, we redefine existing error classes as well as error quantifying metrics. In addition to this, we also introduce five different errors classes and six new metrics relevant to text entry error evaluation in the context of text entry systems augmented with word prediction. We substantiate the validity of error classes and efficacy of the metrics with a sufficient number of instances.

The purposes of this study were to examine whether the use of three different statistical methods for analyzing single-subject data led to similar results and to identify components of graphed data that influence agreement (or disagreement) among the statistical procedures. Forty-two graphs containing single-subject data were examined. Twenty-one were AB charts of hypothetical data. The other 21 graphs appeared in Journal of Applied Behavioral Analysis, Physical Therapy, Journal of the Association for Persons With Severe Handicaps, and Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry. Three different statistical tests--the C statistic, the two-standard deviation band method, and the split-middle method of trend estimation--were used to analyze the 42 graphs. A relatively low degree of agreement (38%) was found among the three statistical tests. The highest rate of agreement for any two statistical procedures (71%) was found for the two-standard deviation band method and the C statistic. A logistic regression analysis revealed that overlap in single-subject graphed data was the best predictor of disagreement among the three statistical tests (beta = .49, P < .03). The results indicate that interpretation of data from single-subject research designs is directly influenced by the method of data analysis selected. Variation exists across both visual and statistical methods of data reduction. The advantages and disadvantages of statistical and visual analysis are described.

Text entry system can be found commonly in modern computer and mobile devices such as smartphone and tablet. However, most of these systems are not easily operable by the handicapped; the system either has small area size of each key or requires major hand movement, such as in the case of the common QWERTY keyboard that contains over a hundred keys. All of these present systems are less than ideal for the handicapped to use as input device. In this paper, a new wireless text entry system is proposed to help the handicapped people to input text efficiently with minimum hand movement. From the design of the prototype, it is smaller than the traditional keyboard, portable, lightweight, user friendly, and long operating hours with built-in mouse function. Practically, it is tested and proven that only one hand is needed to hold the equipment and one finger to interact as well as to input the text. The algorithm used is: Press-Drag-Release algorithm, namely the user just need to presses on the infrared board, followed by finger dragging around the board for letter selection, and lastly, releasing of finger for input the letter. From the result of experiments, the proposed system was tested and proven portable (7.5cm × 5.5cm × 5.5cm), lightweight (100 grams excluding battery), user-friendly with many built-in functions (Esc, Copy, Cut, Paste, Ctrl-A, and Mouse), and long operating hours (29.4 hours operating time with 10,000 mAH battery). For Words Per Minute (WPM), the experiment shows that it can achieve as high as 5 to 10 WPM depends on the skillfulness of the user.

We present the VISAR keyboard: An augmented reality (AR) head-mounted display (HMD) system that supports text entry via a virtualised input surface. Users select keys on the virtual keyboard by imitating the process of single-hand typing on a physical touchscreen display. Our system uses a statistical decoder to infer users’ intended text and to provide error-tolerant predictions. There is also a high-precision fall-back mechanism to support users in indicating which keys should be unmodified by the auto-correction process. A unique advantage of leveraging the well-established touch input paradigm is that our system enables text entry with minimal visual clutter on the see-through display, thus preserving the user’s field-of-view. We iteratively designed and evaluated our system and show that the final iteration of the system supports a mean entry rate of 17.75wpm with a mean character error rate less than 1%. This performance represents a 19.6% improvement relative to the state-of-the-art baseline investigated: A gaze-then-gesture text entry technique derived from the system keyboard on the Microsoft HoloLens. Finally, we validate that the system is effective in supporting text entry in a fully mobile usage scenario likely to be encountered in industrial applications of AR HMDs.

Over the last three decades, eye gaze has become an important modality of text entry in large and small display digital devices covering people with disabilities beside the able-bodied. Despite of many tools being developed, issues like minimizing dwell time, visual search time and interface area, eye-controlled mouse movement stability etc. are still points of concern in making any gaze typing interface more user friendly, accurate and robust. In this paper, we propose EyeK, a gaze-based text entry system which diminishes dwell time and favors to mitigate visual search time. Performance evaluation shows that proposed interface achieves on an average 15% higher text entry rate over the existing interfaces. As designed, the proposed interface can effortlessly be suited in medium-sized display devices like Tablet PC, PDA etc. Also, the developed system can be used by the people with motor disabilities.

Background &amp; Objectives: The purpose of this study is to examine the effect of communication intervention on students with severe and multiple disabilities using single-subject design research. Method: This study analyzed nine single-subject design studies that were published in Korea Citation Index-listed journals(including candidate journals). In order to calculate the effect sizes of the communication intervention, this study derived Tau U scores presented as one of the methods to calculate the effect sizes of single-subject design research. After measuring Tau U scores according to the variables of individual studies, this study used Kruskal-Wallis test and Mann-Whitney U test to compare and analyze the effect sizes according to moderating variables in dependent variables, demographic characteristics (the types of disability, genders, ages, and school levels), and research characteristics (research designs, intervention environments, intervention period, treatment fidelity). Results: According to the results of calculating Tau U as effect sizes in order to examine the effect of communication intervention on desirable behaviors and problem behaviors in students with severe and multiple disabilities, in a total of 9 analysis papers, Tau U as the effect size on desirable behaviors (the number of analyses = 156) to be expected that the effect size of dependent variables would be positive was 0.93, whereas Tau U as the effect size on problem behaviors (the number of analyses = 33) to be expected that the effect size of dependent variables would be negative was -0.87. Conclusion: Thus, it was confirmed that the effects of intervention on desirable behaviors and problem behaviors were very effective overall in the papers that were analyzed. There were mostly high effect sizes according to diverse intervention variables in the studies on communication intervention of students with severe and multiple disabilities. Also, according to the results of the analysis of thediverse moderating variables, there were significant differences in the types of disabilities reported. Lastly, this study discussed the direction for future studies on communication intervention on students with severe and multiple disabilities.

Education can have a powerful and long-term effect on people's lives and therefore should be based on evidence of what works best. This assertion warrants a definition of what constitutes good research evidence. Two research designs that are often thought to come from diametrically opposed fields – single-subject research designs and randomised controlled trials – are described and common features, such as the use of probabilistic assumptions and the aim of discovering causal relations, are delineated. Differences between the two research designs are also highlighted and this is used as the basis to set out how these two research designs might better be used to complement one another. Recommendations for future action are made accordingly.

This study presents a set of data analysis approaches for single subject designs (SSDs). The primary purpose is to establish a series of statistical models to supplement visual analysis in single subject research using Bayesian estimation. Linear modeling approach has been used to study level and trend changes. I propose an alternate approach that treats the phase change-point between the baseline and intervention conditions as an unknown parameter. Similar to some existing approaches, the models take into account changes in slopes and intercepts in the presence of serial dependency. The Bayesian procedure used to estimate the parameters and analyze the data is described. Researchers use a variety of statistical analysis methods to analyze different single subject research designs. This dissertation presents a series of statistical models to model data from various conditions: the baseline phase, A-B design, A-B-A-B design, multiple baseline design, alternating treatments design, and changing criterion design. The change-point evaluation method can provide additional confirmation of causal effect of the treatment on target behavior. Software codes are provided as supplemental materials in the appendices. The applicability for the analyses is demonstrated using five examples from the SSD literature.

Intelligent text entry systems, including the now-ubiquitous predictive keyboard, can make text entry more efficient, but little is known about how these systems affect the content that people write. To study how predictive text systems affect content, we compared image captions written with different kinds of predictive text suggestions. Our key findings were that captions written with suggestions were shorter and that they included fewer words that that the system did not predict. Suggestions also boosted text entry speed, but with diminishing benefit for faster typists. Our findings imply that text entry systems should be evaluated not just by speed and accuracy but also by their effect on the content written.

People with severe motor disabilities have extreme access difficulties with all kinds of web services especially when they want not only to surf the web, but also write some text, e.g., to participate in an e-activity. Several problems arise when using traditional scanning systems, such as the low text entry rate, the time consuming task of learning the scan matrix layout, or simply, the poor visibility of the web page due to the large surface needed to display the complete scan matrix on the screen. We propose a reduced virtual keyboard based on scanning with only one switch as input device. The scan matrix consists of only three cells, so ambiguity is present due to the assignment of 26 characters to the three keys. Word-level and character-level disambiguation modes are explored using a mathematical model, and the text entry rates for an expert user were 15.9 and 10.3 words per minute respectively, using a scan period of 0.5 seconds. This keyboard could be embedded into a web page using a Java applet, JavaScript code or a Flash application, or be programmed as an independent application.

The design and evaluation of a high performance soft keyboard for mobile systems are described. Using a model to predict the upper-bound text entry rate for soft keyboards, we designed a keyboard layout with a predicted upper-bound entry rate of 58.2 wpm. This is about 35% faster than the predicted rate for a QWERTY layout. We compared our design (OPTI) with a QWERTY layout in a longitudinal evaluation using five participants and 20 45-minute sessions of text entry. Average entry rates for OPT1 increased from 17.0 wpm initially to 44.3 wpm at session 20. The average rates exceeded those for the QWERTY layout after the 10 session (about 4 hours of practice). A regression equation (R = .997) in the form of the power-law of learning predicts that our upper-bound prediction would be reach at about session 50.

The use of simple augmentative and alternative communication systems for physically able individuals with autism and severe disabilities has not been sufficiently explored. Individuals with severe physical disabilities have used switches primarily to gain control over their environment, yet these switches have the potential to also serve as communication strategies. Thus, investigation of switch training for communicative purposes is warranted. This action-oriented study examined the effects of switch training on the communication of four functionally nonverbal students with severe disabilities and autism. Several elements of communication were investigated: (a) number of communicative interactions, (b) number of spontaneous communicative interactions, (c) percentage of independent communicative interactions, and (d) number of verbalizations. Results indicated that switch training was an effective strategy for helping the students communicate a simple message. The benefits of switch use and implications for future research are discussed.