In order to scale, future systems will need to dramatically reduce data movement. Data movement is expensive in current designs because (i) traditional memory hierarchies force computation to happen unnecessarily far away from data and (ii) processing-in-memory approaches fail to exploit locality.

Web user interfaces today leverage many common GUI design patterns, including navigation bars and menus (hierarchical structure), tabular content presentation, and scrolling. These visual-spatial cues enhance the interaction experience of sighted users. However, the linear nature of screen translation tools currently available to blind users make it difficult to understand or navigate these structures. We introduce Spatial Region Interaction Techniques (SPRITEs) for nonvisual access: a novel method for navigating two-dimensional structures using the keyboard surface. SPRITEs 1) preserve spatial layout, 2) enable bimanual interaction, and 3) improve the end user experience. We used a series of design probes to explore different methods for keyboard surface interaction. Our evaluation of SPRITEs shows that three times as many participants were able to complete spatial tasks with SPRITEs than with their preferred current technology.

We designed, implemented, and evaluated a small physical keyboard, composed of four to five keys with a variety of mappings for the letters, along with one or two navigational function keys operated by the thumb. The small size allows it to be used for smartwatch text entry, and can be mounted on various body parts as a wearable keyboard. It is primarily used as an ambiguous keyboard, akin to T9, although a multi-tap mode is also present. Our keyboard layouts include Alphabetic, Collapsed QWERTY, Mnemonic (where letters are grouped based on their shapes), and Optimized (which minimizes the number of conflicts). In a between-users study, participants achieved an average of 15.4 words per minute (WPM) across all layouts, with one user with the Collapsed QWERTY layout reaching a top speed of 30.6 WPM after 4 hours of practice. User feedback was generally favorable.