Tap to Sign: Towards using American Sign Language for Text Entry on Smartphones

Soon, smartphones may be capable of allowing American Sign Language (ASL) signing and/or fingerspelling for text entry. To explore the usefulness of this approach, we compared emulated fingerspelling recognition with a virtual keyboard for 12 Deaf participants. With practice, fingerspelling is faste...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Proceedings of the ACM on human-computer interaction 2023-09, Vol.7 (MHCI), p.1-23, Article 227
Main Authors: Hassan, Saad, Glasser, Abraham, Shengelia, Max, Starner, Thad, Forbes, Sean, Qualls, Nathan, Sepah, Sam S.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Accessibility
Accessibility design and evaluation methods
Empirical studies in accessibility
Human-centered computing
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Summary:Soon, smartphones may be capable of allowing American Sign Language (ASL) signing and/or fingerspelling for text entry. To explore the usefulness of this approach, we compared emulated fingerspelling recognition with a virtual keyboard for 12 Deaf participants. With practice, fingerspelling is faster (42.5 wpm), potentially has fewer errors (4.02% corrected error rate) and higher throughput (14.2 bits/second), and is as desired as virtual keyboard texting (31.9 wpm; 6.46% corrected error rate; 10.9 bits/second throughput). Our second study recruits another 12 Deaf users at the 2022 National Association for the Deaf conference to compare the walk-up usability of fingerspelling alone, signing, and virtual keyboard text entry for interacting with an emulated mobile assistant. Both signing and virtual keyboard text entry were preferred over fingerspelling.
ISSN:2573-0142
2573-0142
DOI:10.1145/3604274