TapList: testing the effectiveness of tap access to the n-best list in pen-based text entry

Handwriting recognition is always error prone. Therefore, recognition error management is an important part of any user interface that attempts to interpret user's pen strokes. We experimented with a technique called TapList where a stylus tap is used to switch the newly recognized character to the next item on an invisible n-best list returned by a character recognizer. The purpose of our experimentation was to verify that it does not hurt text entry performance even under tight time constraints. We did not see significant performance degradation due to TapList in comparison to conventional backspace-based error correction technique. Thus, TapList is likely to improve text entry performance if the cost of re-entry of misrecognized text is higher than it was with the fast unistroke alphabet used in our experiments. Further work is needed to compare TapList to a visible n-best list and to other alternative techniques.