Design and Implementation of Virtual Keyboard for Amharic Text Entry on Pda System
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Date
2008-06
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
PDAs have become increasingly popular due to advances and availability of wireless
services. The desire for effective text entry on portable devices have also increased with
the advent of virtual keyboard being as one of the major contributors to the sudden
burst of research in handheld device text entry techniques. Virtual keyboard is the one
which employs on screen keyboard where programmable graphical buttons are
handling the input activity based on the event triggered on them. In order to design
virtual keyboard one has to consider nature of the language where by the text entry
mechanism is achieved. In this project the Amharic language is chosen for the layout of
the virtual keyboard to be designed. Amharic is the working language of the federal
government of Ethiopia and is spoken and written as a first or second language in many
parts of the country. The abundance of characters in Ethiopic script brings a challenge
for developing Amharic virtual keyboard on handheld devices.
The objective of this project is to address the design and implementation of the virtual
keyboard for Amharic text entry on PDA devices. For this purpose the layout design for
Amharic virtual keyboard is proposed and an Amharic virtual keyboard is developed by
taking inherent challenge of Amharic language in to account. The developed virtual
keyboard is implemented for a simulator of an Android operating system PDA.
Android OS is selected for the implementation considering its possible future
popularity and usage for mobile handheld devices such as PDAs, smart phones, mobile
phone etc. The system is also designed in such a way that Amharic and
English virtual keyboards can be switched to enable multi-script text entry..
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Can Be Switched; To Enable Multi-Script Text Entry