Theoretical and Architectural Support for Input Device Adaptation

The graphical user interface (GUI) is today’s de facto standard for desktop computing. GUIs are designed and optimized for use with a mouse and keyboard. However, modern trends make this reliance on a mouse and keyboard problematic for two reasons. First, people with disabilities may have trouble operating those devices. Second, with the popularization of wireless communication and mobile devices such as personal data assistants, the mouse and keyboard are often replaced by other input devices. Our solution is a tool that can be used to translate a user’s input to a form recognizable by any Windows-based application. We argue that a formal model of input is necessary to support arbitrary translations of this sort. We present a model, based on Markov information sources, that extends past work in its ability to handle software-based input such as speech recognition, and to measure relative device bandwidth. We also present our translation tool, which is based on our model, along with four applications built using that tool.