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

移动的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，现在超过25%的电子邮件是在手机上打开的。随着老龄工作人口的增加，由于人口老龄化和退休年龄的增加，越来越多的数字经济工作者将需要使用移动的技术工作到60多岁。拟议的《欧洲无障碍法》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-这可能包括信息和通信技术，包括移动的电话。联合王国老龄组织鼓励联合王国政府支持该法案，并指出欧盟必须确保该法案的范围足够广泛，以涵盖老年人的需求。文本输入是移动的交互的核心，例如电子邮件、社交网络、即时消息以及与诸如网络或地图搜索的服务的交互，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，而是依赖于屏幕上的触摸键盘。这些键盘比传统的迷你物理键盘更慢，更容易出错，但由于它们允许全屏服务和更大的阅读区域而受到欢迎。虽然已经有许多关于触摸屏上文本输入使用的研究，但很少有研究老化对文本输入的影响的工作，并且没有关于现代触摸屏手机的研究，其中视觉敏锐度降低，运动控制降低和工作记忆减少都可能产生影响。目前，行业专注于瞄准当前年轻用户的主要市场，为老年用户设计的任何设备都是非常简化的手机，而不是人们习惯的功能强大的智能手机。我们的初步研究还表明，老年用户在使用现代智能手机时遇到了相当大的麻烦，但他们可能愿意采用新的键盘布局和技术来弥补这一点。在本项目中，我们将对老年人的文本输入进行详细调查。我们将建立在我们的初步结果和目前的原型键盘进行参与设计会议与老年用户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组的触摸屏点击时间，并开发意外点击过滤器以减少错误。我们将根据我们的研究结果正式评估键盘，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.