What is AccuTouch

Much has changed in computer interfacing since the early days of computing—or has it? Admittedly, gone are the days of punched cards and/or paper tape readers as input devices; likewise, monitors (displays) have superseded printers as the primary output device. Nevertheless, the QWERTY keyboard shows little sign of falling into disuse—this is essentially the same input device as those used on the earliest (electromechanical) TeleTYpewriters, in which the “worst” key layout was deliberately chosen to slow down user input (i.e., fast typists). The three major advances since the 1950s have been (1) the rise of low cost (commodity off-theshelf) CRT monitors in the 1960s (and in more recent times, LCD ones), (2) the replacement of (text-based) command line interfaces with graphical user interfaces in the 1980s, and (3) the rise of the Internet/World Wide Web during the 1990s. In recent times, while speech recognition (and synthesis) has made some inroads (i.e., McTeal, 2002; O’Shaughnessy, 2003), the QWERTY keyboard and mouse remain the dominant input modalities.