Paper Reading #17 - Enhanced Area Cursors: Reducing Fine Pointing Demands

Comments:
Joe Cabrera

Michael Atkinson

Reference Info:

Leah Findlater

UIST’10, October 3–6, 2010, New York, New York, USA
Summary:
This paper talked about different ways to aid those users who have impairments and difficulties using the conventional computer mouse. Two different methods werre discussed in the paper that would help users in this area: Click-and-Cross and Visual-Motor-Magnifier. The Visual-Motor-Magnifier enables user to enlarge area of click in order to better see and control their mouse. This allows for users to click on the intended button. This reduces the ammount of fine pointing. ursor size changes dynamically depending on the number of clickable targets in its surrounding. Another way of helping users is the Click-and-Cross method. This sllows users to click in an area and different clickable targets get seperated into arcs, constructing a circle. This allows for a user to easily point to an icon without having to deal with clutter.

Discussion:
I thought this was a great way to deal with the inabilty to click using the cursor. I would like to try this method out to see how intuitive and easy to work it is. It is interesting that they had two major methods of doing this in order to adjust to different users and their needs. I think I would like to try the Click-and_Cross method out of the two.
, Alex Jansen, Kristen Shinohara, Morgan Dixon, Peter Kamb, Joshua Rakita, Jacob O. Wobbrock

Enhanced Area Cursors: Reducing Fine Pointing Demands for People with Motor Impairments