A Study on the Layout of On-Screen Keyboard for Eye-Typing of Chinese Characters

Text entry is one of the main interaction tasks in gaze-controlled interfaces. The primary method of eye-typing consists of selection of keys from an on-screen soft keyboard. The keyboard layout is a critical issue for human-computer interaction especially for typing Chinese characters because the component of Chinese pronunciation is different from alphabetic languages. This article compared three kinds of keyboard layouts that were used to input Chinese characters through pinyin input method. It is shown that the NEW layout proposed by the authors takes the advantage over the other two layouts not only on input speed, but also on moving distance. The subjective evaluation revealed that the users preferred the NEW layout to QWERT and ABC layouts. We therefore strongly recommend the NEW keyboard layout for Chinese input.