Name
Abstract | ||
|---|---|---|
Central-Bantu speakers usually use the predominant QWERTY keyboard on a combination of some local and European languages, such as Chichewa and English. There has been no research that looks into usability issues of Central-Bantu speakers typing text in English and in local languages on QWERTY. This article presents our experiments that assess the usability of multilingual keyboards for Central-Bantu language speakers. We first obtained a Central-Bantu layout that is partially optimized from QWERTY, based on the German-QWERTZ keyboard, and a highly optimized version based on the French-AZERTY keyboard. The two keyboard layouts (Entry and advanced-level) were optimized for both English and Chichewa, for a two-finger text-entry mode. Simulation tests measured text-entry rates for Chichewa and English. The usability experiments show that the text-entry rate of English is about 13% higher than that of Chichewa, which is close to the prediction of the simulation test. The Bantu keyboards reduced this imbalance to about 4%. While the simulation tests predicted an increase in text-entry rate, the experimental tests show a decrease in performance. Typing-error rates almost double from QWERTY to the Advanced-Bantu keyboard. In this study, we show that the Central-Bantu keyboards have high practical-performance potential for both Chichewa and English, at balanced usability levels. |
Year | DOI | Venue |
|---|---|---|
2021 | 10.1080/10447318.2021.1895530 | INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION |
DocType | Volume | Issue |
Journal | 37 | 16 |
ISSN | Citations | PageRank |
1044-7318 | 0 | 0.34 |
References | Authors | |
0 | 4 | |
Name | Order | Citations | PageRank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Thokozani Chimkono | 1 | 0 | 0.34 |
| eunice mphakobanda | 2 | 0 | 0.68 |
| Amelia Taylor | 3 | 0 | 0.34 |
| Pascal Kishindo | 4 | 0 | 0.34 |