Empirical investigation and user-centred development of touch-screen text entry methods for older adults

移动技术现在对工作和社交生活产生了相当大的影响，例如，据估计，超过25%的电子邮件现在是在手机上打开的。随着老年工作人口的增加，由于人口老龄化和退休年龄的提高，越来越多的数字经济工作者将需要使用移动技术工作到65岁左右。拟议的欧洲无障碍法案旨在要求残疾人和老年人能够获得对公民参与社会至关重要的商品和服务--这可能包括包括移动电话在内的信息和通信技术。AGE UK鼓励联合王国政府支持该法案，并声明欧盟必须确保该法案的范围足够广泛，以涵盖老年人的需要。文本输入是移动交互的核心，如电子邮件、社交网络、即时消息以及与网络或地图搜索等服务的交互，因此它对人们参与工作和社会越来越重要。大多数智能手机现在没有任何物理键盘，而是依靠屏幕上的触摸键盘。这些键盘被证明比传统的迷你物理键盘速度更慢，更容易出错，但因为它们允许全屏服务和更大的阅读区域而很受欢迎。虽然已经有很多关于触摸屏上文本输入使用情况的研究，但研究老化对文本输入的影响的工作很少，在现代触摸屏手机上也没有，因为在现代触摸屏手机上，视觉敏锐度降低、运动控制能力减弱和工作记忆减少都可能产生影响。目前，行业正专注于瞄准当前的主要市场--年轻用户，为老年用户设计的任何设备都是极其简化的手机，而不是人们逐渐习惯的功能强大的智能手机。我们的初步研究还表明，老年用户对现代智能手机有相当大的问题，但可能愿意采用新的键盘布局和技术来弥补这一点。在这个项目中，我们将对老年人的文本输入进行详细的调查。我们将以我们的初步结果和当前的原型键盘为基础，与老年用户进行参与式设计会议，以确定老年人文本输入的关键设计标准。我们将定量测量不同年龄段的触摸屏点击次数，并开发意外点击过滤器以减少错误。我们将根据我们的发现对键盘进行正式评估，以评估我们的假设，即老年人可以成功地使用适当设计的触摸屏文本输入方法。

Mobile technologies now have a considerable impact on work and social lives, for example it is estimated that over 25% of emails are now opened on mobiles. As the older working population rises, due to both aging population demographics and increasing retirement age, an increasing number of digital economy workers will require to use mobile technologies for work into their mid/late 60s. The proposed European Accessibility Act aims to require goods and services that are seen as critical for the citizen to participate in society to be accessible to disabled and older people - this is likely to cover information and communication technologies including mobile phones. Age UK encourage the UK Government to support the act and state that the EU must ensure that the scope of the act is broad enough to cover the needs of older people. Text entry is core to mobile interaction such as email, social networking, instant messaging and interacting with services such as web or map searching and thus it is increasingly important to people's participation in work and society. The majority of smartphones now do not have any physical keyboard but rely on on-screen touch keyboards. These have been shown to be slower and more error-prone than traditional mini-physical keyboards, but are popular as they permit full screen services and larger reading area. While there have been numerous studies into text entry usage on touchscreens, there has been very little work studying the effects of aging on text entry, and none on modern touchscreen phones where reduced visual acuity, reduced motor control and reduced working memory are all likely to have an impact. Currently industry is focussed on targeting the current main market of younger users with any devices designed for older users being extremely simplified phones rather than powerful smartphones people are becoming accustomed to. Our initial studies have also shown that older users have considerable trouble with modern smartphones but may be willing to adopt new keyboard layouts and technologies to compensate for this.In this project we will conduct a detailed investigation into text entry for older adults. We will build on our initial results and current prototype keyboards to conduct participatory design sessions with older users to identify key design criteria for older adult text entry. We will quantitatively measure touchscreen tapping times for different age groups and develop accidental tap filters to reduce errors. We will formally evaluate keyboards based on our findings to assess our hypothesis that older people can successfully use appropriately designed touch-screen text entry methods.