A HCI Keyboard Layout Design for Blind People
Kitsana Kladyoo, Supachate Innet · 2007
Presently, computers have become a part of everybody daily life, including disables such as blind people. A keyboard is a main input equipment of computers. However, these keyboards are not yet suitable for blind people, especially for the Thai alphabet system. This paper proposes a new layout design of computer keyboard for blind people. The research results show that Braille character code is very attractive to be used for designing the layout. Many mechanisms for arrangement the keys or buttons are investigated and the results shows that to type Thai Braille character code, the keyboard layout requires add/drop cells buttons in addition to the normal buttons representing number 1 to 6 of the Braille character code. Moreover, the results suggest that such buttons must be in order of 5 3 1 2 4 and 6 rather than 1 2 3 4 5 and 6 which has been used in many keyboard currently available on the market.