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Enhanced area cursors: reducing fine pointing demands for people with motor impairments

Published: 03 October 2010 Publication History

Abstract

Computer users with motor impairments face major challenges with conventional mouse pointing. These challenges are mostly due to fine pointing corrections at the final stages of target acquisition. To reduce the need for correction-phase pointing and to lessen the effects of small target size on acquisition difficulty, we introduce four enhanced area cursors, two of which rely on magnification and two of which use goal crossing. In a study with motor-impaired and able-bodied users, we compared the new designs to the point and Bubble cursors, the latter of which had not been evaluated for users with motor impairments. Two enhanced area cursors, the Visual-Motor-Magnifier and Click-and-Cross, were the most successful new designs for users with motor impairments, reducing selection time for small targets by 19%, corrective submovements by 45%, and error rate by up to 82% compared to the point cursor. Although the Bubble cursor also improved performance, participants with motor impairments unanimously preferred the enhanced area cursors.

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cover image ACM Conferences
UIST '10: Proceedings of the 23nd annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology
October 2010
476 pages
ISBN:9781450302715
DOI:10.1145/1866029
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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Published: 03 October 2010

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Author Tags

  1. accessibility
  2. area cursors
  3. bubble cursor
  4. goal crossing
  5. magnification
  6. motor space
  7. visual space

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Overall Acceptance Rate 561 of 2,567 submissions, 22%

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  • (2023)Throughput and Effective Parameters in CrossingExtended Abstracts of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544549.3585817(1-9)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
  • (2023)An Expressivity-Complexity Tradeoff?: User-Defined Gestures from the Wheelchair Space are Mostly DeicticExtended Abstracts of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544549.3585695(1-8)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
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