Gaze'N'Touch: Enhancing Text Selection on Mobile Devices Using Gaze

Text selection is a frequent task we do everyday to edit, modify or delete text. Selecting a word requires not only precision but also switching between selections and typing which influences both speed and error rates. In this paper, we evaluate a novel concept that extends text editing with an additional modality, that is gaze. We present a user study (N=16) where we explore how, the novel concepts called GazeButton can improve text selection by comparing it to touch based selection. In addition, we tested the effect of text size on the selection techniques by comparing two different text sizes.Results show that gaze based selection was faster with bigger text size, although not statistically significant. Qualitative feedback show a preference on gaze over touch which motivates a new direction of gaze usage in text editors.