Fact · Typing and writing speed
The Lin et al. study found that one main reason gesture typing was faster for older adults is that they entered whole words in gesture typing, while they often fixed individual letters during tap typing.
Checked against its source on October 16, 2026
In the source's own words
“older adults adopted the word-level inputting strategy in gesture typing, while often used the letter-level correction strategy in tap typing”
Why Is Gesture Typing Promising for Older Adults? Comparing Gesture and Tap Typing Behavior of Older with Young Adults, Yu-Hao Lin et al., ASSETS 2018, Proceedings of the 20th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility, 2018, Abstract.
Open the original (DOI 10.1145/3234695.3236350)- What it measures
- The authors offer this as one of the main reasons for the speed gap in their comparison. It is their explanation from logged data, not a separate test of the strategy.
- What it does not show
- A stated explanation from one study of older adults. It is not a measured effect, and the abstract does not say how common the strategy is among younger users.