A Hindi Virtual Keyboard Interface with Multimodal Feedback: A Case Study with a Dyslexic Child

Abstract

Up to 15% of the Indian school-going children suffer from dyslexia. This paper aims to determine the extent to which existing knowledge about the eye-tracking based human-computer interface can be used to assist these children in their reading and writing activities. A virtual keyboard system with multimodal feedback is proposed and designed for a lexically and structurally complex language and optimized for multimodal feedback involving several portable, non-invasive, and low-cost input devices: a touch screen, an eye-tracker, and a soft-switch. The performance was evaluated in terms of text-entry rate, information transfer rate, and type of errors with three different experimental conditions: 1) touch-screen condition with auditory feedback 2) eye-tracking condition with auditory and visual feedback, and 3) eye-tracking and soft-switch condition with auditory and visual feedback. The proposed multimodal feedback has shown a significant improvement in text-entry rate with less error. This work represents the first virtual keyboard with multimodal feedback for dyslexic children in the Hindi language, which can be extended to other languages. <br/