Tsinghua and Sogou release World’s First Smart Keyboard for the Visually ImpairedBy India Education

India Education Diary Bureau

28th June 2020

Tsinghua and Sogou release World’s First Smart Keyboard for the Visually Impaired

By India Education Diary Bureau

The Department of Computer Science and Technology of Tsinghua University and Sogou Inc. (NYSE: SOGO) released the world’s first smart keyboard for visually impaired users on May 21, the ninth annual Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD), which focuses on raising awareness of digital access and inclusion for people with disabilities and impairments. The smart keyboard, VIPBoard, aims at improving the underlying keyboard algorithm without altering current input interaction.

Entering text on their smartphone remains hugely challenging for visually impaired users. While modern touchscreen keyboards are all powered by the word-level auto-correction ability to handle input errors, visually impaired users cannot enjoy this benefit. They rely on a screen-reader keyboard on their smartphones, which only offers character-level input that has no predictive text correction ability. When users are texting on their smartphones, they often miss the targeted key when touching without visual feedback.

To tackle this problem, Professor Shi Yuanchun and Associate Researcher Yu Chun of the Department of Computer Science and Technology of Tsinghua University have led their research team to successfully design a character-level auto-correction method, achieving a 63% reduction in the character error rate (CER).

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