Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp. (NTT Head Office: Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo; President and CEO: Hiroo Unoura) has developed a new gesture recognition software (Move&Flick) that allows users to input Japanese characters including Kanji without looking at their smartphone.

Conventional text input on a smartphone with a touch screen demands that the user find the key that corresponds to the desired hiragana, or alphanumeric character and touch the key precisely. This burden is excessive for the visually impaired people who have difficulty identifying and pushing the precise key.

Basic operations in Move&Flick are shown below.

(STEP1)

Touch an arbitrary position around the center of the screen with a single finger.

(STEP2)

Without lifting the finger from the screen, move it in any of eight directions (up, right-up, right, right-down, down, left-down, left, left-up) over a prescribed amount to select a consonant.

(STEP3)

Without lifting the finger from the screen, move it in any of eight directions again to select a vowel after STEP2.

(STEP4)

Lift the finger from the screen if target character is reached. This imposes a much lower burden to find the target key.

Also, the user can execute commands like Kana-kanji conversion, delete etc. by moving a single finger in any of eight directions twice from a central but arbitrary position along either side of the screen. This allows easy access to various operations such as converting kana to Kanji and modifying characters.

In the process of developing this software, its design was refined through feedback from about 30 visually impaired persons including employees of NTT Claruty. (NTT Claruty Corp. hires visually impaired people: https://www.ntt-claruty.co.jp/index.html )