Designing a virtual keyboard with multi-modal access for people with disabilities

Virtual keyboards or on-screen keyboards are commonly used as a means of augmentative communication by people with severe speech and motion disability. Any such virtual keyboard is characterized by keys´ layout design and method of access. In this paper we present a virtual keyboard that can support multiple modes of access and has an optimum layout based on the frequency of occurrence of alphabet in English text. We have compared our proposed layout against commonly used alphabetical layout, which demonstrates a superior performance of our design.