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The information-theoretic analysis of unimodal interfaces and their multimodal counterparts

Published: 09 October 2005 Publication History

Abstract

That multimodal interfaces have benefits over unimodal ones has often been asserted. Several such benefits have been described informally, but, to date, few have actually been formalized or quantified. In this paper, the hypothesized benefits of semantically redundant multimodal input actions are described formally and are quantified using the formalisms provided by Information Theory. A reinterpretation of Keates and Robinson's empirical data (1998) shows that their criticism of multimodal interfaces was, in part, unfounded.

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References

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S. Keates and P. Robinson. The use of gestures in multimodal input. In Proceedings of the Third International ACM Conference on Assistive Technologies ASSETS'98, pp. 35--42, Marina del Rey, CA, 1998.
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Cited By

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  • (2008)Integrated speech and gaze control for realistic desktop environmentsProceedings of the 2008 symposium on Eye tracking research & applications10.1145/1344471.1344492(79-82)Online publication date: 26-Mar-2008
  • (2006)Indirect text entry using one or two keysProceedings of the 8th international ACM SIGACCESS conference on Computers and accessibility10.1145/1168987.1168992(18-25)Online publication date: 23-Oct-2006
  • (2006)Making the mainstream accessibleProceedings of the 10th international conference on Computers Helping People with Special Needs10.1007/11788713_57(380-387)Online publication date: 11-Jul-2006
  • Show More Cited By

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cover image ACM Conferences
Assets '05: Proceedings of the 7th international ACM SIGACCESS conference on Computers and accessibility
October 2005
232 pages
ISBN:1595931597
DOI:10.1145/1090785
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

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Publication History

Published: 09 October 2005

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Author Tags

  1. augmentative and alternative communication (AAC)
  2. interface evaluation
  3. interventions for communication disorders
  4. multimodal interfaces
  5. speech generating devices (SGD)
  6. voice output communication aids (VOCA)

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Cited By

View all
  • (2008)Integrated speech and gaze control for realistic desktop environmentsProceedings of the 2008 symposium on Eye tracking research & applications10.1145/1344471.1344492(79-82)Online publication date: 26-Mar-2008
  • (2006)Indirect text entry using one or two keysProceedings of the 8th international ACM SIGACCESS conference on Computers and accessibility10.1145/1168987.1168992(18-25)Online publication date: 23-Oct-2006
  • (2006)Making the mainstream accessibleProceedings of the 10th international conference on Computers Helping People with Special Needs10.1007/11788713_57(380-387)Online publication date: 11-Jul-2006
  • (2005)The contrastive evaluation of unimodal and multimodal interfaces for voice otput communication aidsProceedings of the 7th international conference on Multimodal interfaces10.1145/1088463.1088515(301-308)Online publication date: 4-Oct-2005

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