1 A Model for Voice-Activated Expression Editing

Code entry and editing by manually disabled computer programmers is difficult or impossible in conventional GUI-based development environments, since these rely heavily on mouse and keyboard use. The advent of accurate and responsive speech recognition technologies has made the speech user interface (SUI) a viable option for input. While high level programming constructs can be utilized by such interfaces in a natural way, expressions may be very complex in structure and may use a wide variety of variables, literals, punctuation marks and operator symbols. A SUI-based syntax-directed editor was previously presented [6], but its interface model did not lend itself to being extended to include expression editing, and therefore this aspect was omitted from both the model and implementation. This paper fills this gap by presenting a SUI-based model for entering and editing programming language expressions. A Java implementation was evaluated by a group of programmers to verify the functionality and to test the ease of use of the model. The results of this evaluation are presented and discussed