Abstract
This study evaluated the cursor-positioning effect of a Dynamic Pointing Assistive Program (DPAP) and a newly developed mouse driver for people with disabilities. The mouse driver was redesigned using software technology that could replace the standard mouse driver, change a mouse wheel into a thumb/finger poke detector, and intercept mouse actions. The DPAP was designed to move a cursor to a pre-defined target position where the user can poke his/her thumb/finger to rotate a mouse wheel in order to move a cursor to a target, whereby the cursor will automatically jump to a series of pre-defined target positions in order according to the amount of wheel rotation and direction.
In this study, 20 people with disabilities participated in the experiment. Trial completion time was determined and compared with the results from previous studies of cursor-capturing function (Automatic Pointing Assistive Program (APAP)) and normal conditions (i.e. with no function). The results of the experiment show that pointing efficiency was improved by 64.5% with the DPAP compared to that of the normal condition (p< 0.001), and was improved by 39.3% compared to that of APAP (p< 0.001). The recorded data was subjected to one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA), with the level of significance p< 0.05, which indicates that the capturing functions had a significant effect on the trial completion time (F(2,57)=336.76; p< 0.001).
The participants can acquire targets easily, quickly and accurately with the assistance of DPAP. Furthermore, the DPAP functions are expected to help elderly users, novices and even experienced users in some environments, such as mobile environments, in which users position a small target while they are moving, computer games in which the speed and the precision of the positioning is critical, and software applications in which simple positioning tasks occur repeatedly.