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A minimum chord stenograph keyboard for blind and sighted users

University of British Columbia

This thesis deals with the design and testing of an experimental stenograph keyboard for blind and sighted users. The new keyboard, called the Minimum Chord Stenograph (MCS), is presented. It comprises two panels of six keys, one for each hand. Relocation of the fingers above the keys is at a minimum. A coding scheme for MCS was developed to allow ex act phonemic description of the text or speech to be entered by alternate hand typing. Experiments were carried out with the MCS and with the standard Stenograph-Boswell keyboards. The time between successive movements of hands on the keyboards was precisely measured live with a 386 com puter and the statistics have been compiled and analyzed. The results show that the MCS’ performance (WPM) is significantly better than the stan dard stenograph-Boswell; the problem of training time for the stenograph seems to be solved at least at the level of initial competence. Extrapolating from the published results for QWERTY, MCS has much better performance than QWERTY at the initial stage. In conclusion, MCS keyboard may pro vide an efficient alternative to the existing standard stenograph keyboard and to the QWERTY keyboard.

Thesis/Dissertation

application/pdf

2009-01-05

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http://hdl.handle.net/2429/3332

Electrical and Computer Engineering

University of British Columbia

UBCV

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