TapStr: A Tap and Stroke Reduced-Qwerty for Smartphones
Mohammad Akbor Sharif, Gulnar Rakhmetulla, Ahmed Sabbir Arif · 2020
TapStr is a single-row reduced-Qwerty that enables text entry on smartphones by performing taps and directional strokes. It is an unambiguous keyboard, thus does not rely on a statistical decoder to function. It supports the entry of uppercase and lowercase letters, numeric characters, symbols, and emojis. Its purpose is to provide an economic alternative to virtual Qwerty when saving touchscreen real-estate is more desired than the entry speed and a convenient alternative when users do not want to repeatedly switch between multiple layouts for mixed-case alphanumeric text and symbols (such as a password). In a short-term study, TapStr yielded about 11 WPM with plain phrases and 8 WPM with phrases containing uppercase letters, numbers, and symbols.