CHAPTER 16

Text Entry for People with Visual Impairments

Chieko Asakawa and Hironobu Takagi,     Tokyo Research Laboratory, IBM Research, Tokyo, Japan

16.1 INTRODUCTION

According to the World Health Organization, in 2002 more than 161 million people were visually impaired, and 37 million of them were blind1. (World Health Organization, 2004). These numbers are much larger than most people think. This impairment is characterized by its limitations on obtaining information from a human being’s widest cognitive channel, sight. Most people obtain at least 80% of their information through the sense of sight. It is obviously a severe problem for the visually impaired to be unable to write or read printed documents on their own, and this makes it ...

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