Skim Reading and Touch Typing Crits - Jack

Skim Reading- Eye Tracking
The first thing that came to mind was that reading about what I was doing. Skim reading an article on skim reading just seems funny. It is nice to know that my natural tendency to skim is in fact quite effective. It is good to know that if a reader is not immediately drawn into a paragraph that there is the natural tendency to skip the rest of the paragraph. This demonstrates the need to avoid "fluff" and to ensure that all sentences are necessary. I am quite skeptical of the method used in the study, 28 students with a mean age of ~21 years and ~2.24 SD does not represent a broad sample.

Typing on Flat Glass
The issue of effective mobile input still remains. The study is interesting. there is little reason why a gesture based typing mechanism could not be almost as effective as physical keyboard. Although the tactile response of a regular keyboard may be missed, I suspect that a virtual keyboard based on the gestures, corrective and adaptive typing behaviour would approach the accuracy of a physical keyboard and would likely have little effect on the typing speed. Their results showed that accuracy was lower without visible keyboards but there may be improvements in the future. One issue I could see with this is that the visual feedback is likely needed for amateur typists where the paper only used expert typists.