Peer-reviewed research
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 · DOI 10.1145/3234695.3236350
Read the originalRead on October 16, 2026
- What it is
- A controlled study from Stony Brook University that logged stroke-level data as older and young adults typed by gesture and by tapping. It is one of the few head-to-head comparisons of swipe and tap typing with participants who had no prior gesture experience.
- How much weight it carries
- Peer-reviewed, published at ASSETS, the ACM conference on accessibility. The sample is small (14 older adults with no gesture experience), the task is phrase transcription, and the keyboard and device details are not in the abstract, so the gap may not match everyday texting by younger users.
Facts taken from this source
- In a controlled study, 14 older adults with no prior gesture typing experience entered text 15.28 percent faster by gesture (swipe) typing than by tap typing.
“The gesture typing input speed was 15.28% higher than that of tap typing for 14 older adults who had none gesture typing experience in the past” (Abstract)
- 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.
“older adults adopted the word-level inputting strategy in gesture typing, while often used the letter-level correction strategy in tap typing” (Abstract)