Toward Goldilocks' Pointing Device: Determining a "Just Right" Gain Setting for Users With Physical Impairments
By Koester, Heidi Horstmann; LoPresti, Edmund; Simpson, Richard C.; ASSETS 2005 - The Seventh International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility, pp. 84-89Publication Date: October 9-12, 2005
Study evaluated the computer Input Device Agent (IDA), an agent which recommends a pointing-device control-display gain for a given user. Gain, measured in pixels per inch, determines how far the mouse cursor moves on the screen for a given movement of the pointing device. If a relationship could be found between an individual’s movement patterns and optimal configuration settings, an automated agent could customize the settings in response to the user’s needs. The study included 12 regular computer users ranging in age from 27 to 68, 7 male and 5 female, whose physical impairments affect their ability to use a mouse. A recommendation phase to determine the IDA gain for each user was followed by an evaluation phase measuring each participant’s performance under 3 conditions: using the gain recommended by IDA, using the Windows default gain, and using the participant’s own gain. Using the IDA gain showed no meaningful differences as compared to the default settings; however, gain did have a significant effect on throughput, percent of error-free trials, cursor entries, and overshoot, cursor entries being the most strongly affected, showing a steady increase with increasing gain. Implications for further study are discussed.
Published by: Association for Computing Machinery (Website:http://www.acm.org)
SIGACCESS (ACM Special Interest Group on Accessible Computing) (Web Site: http://www.sigaccess.org )
