Use of Voice Input to Enhance Cursor Control in Mainstream Gaming Applications
By Kehoe, Aidan; Neff, Flaithri; Pitt, Ian; Universal Access in the Information Society, Vol. 8, No. 2, pp 89-96Publication Date: June 2009
Paper describes a program that uses voice input to dynamically change the mouse cursor gain and turn on/off mouse acceleration during a computer game. The program was developed to make games more accessible to older adults and people with disabilities that have difficulties in operating pointing devices. The program runs in parallel with games. While the players’ hands operate the mouse and keyboard as usual, voice input can be used to dynamically change cursor-control parameters. The application requires the use of a headset. Earcons, defined as synthesized sounds used to represent a specific item or event, are used to provide optional aural feedback to the user. During game play, the standard game audio is directed to the system speakers and, if enabled, the earcon sounds are played on the headset. In addition to using a command-and-control style vocabulary of words such as “Next” and “Previous” to change cursor-control parameters, experiments were conducted to make such changes using extended words. An evaluation of the program was performed using the Microsoft Windows Speech Recognizer 8.0 on Windows Vista with 5 participants speaking mixtures of regular and extended words to make incremental and decremental adjustments to the value of a slider control. The tests showed that the most effective and robust control can be achieved when the user speaks a command in a regular speech style and appends any extra vocalization to continue the operation. Further work was deemed necessary to derive and refine the threshold functionality of the program.
Published by: Springer Publishing Company (Website:http://www.springerpub.com)
Link to text: http://www.springerlink.com/content/l6377187x69416j5
