This is the first left-field of 2009, I hope you all had a great holiday. This month, as I was browsing the ACM DL, I found out that there is a very interesting annual conference on children and interaction called the international conference on Interaction design and children. In 2008, they had the seventh international conference in Chicago. I found a paper in their 2008 proceedings entitled PointAssist: helping four year olds point with ease. This paper mainly presents the design and motivation of a tool called PointAssist. This tool helps children in pointing tasks by detecting the type of motion that occurs when children have difficulty in pointing at a target, and triggering a precision mode that slows the speed of the mouse cursor in those cases. When I read this paper I thought it could be useful for people who work on improving the input usability for disabled people.

PointAssist: helping four year olds point with ease

Children's difficulty in point-and-click tasks using indirect pointing devices such as the mouse has been documented in several studies. This difficulty is manifested in a lack of control near the target, which often results in children clicking inaccurately. This paper presents and evaluates PointAssist, a tool that helps children in pointing tasks by detecting the type of motion that occurs when children have difficulty pointing at a target, and triggering a precision mode that slows the speed of the mouse cursor in those cases. We conducted a study with 30 four year old participants who completed point-and-click tasks with and without PointAssist. PointAssist provided participants with significant advantages in terms of click accuracy, enabling them to be as accurate as 18 to 22 year olds in a previous study with a very similar setup.

Full Paper: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1463689.1463757
Full Proceedings: Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Interaction design and children, Pages 202-209, 2008.

Labels: Children, clicking, interaction, pointing