A Review of Design and Evaluation Practices in Mobile Text Entry for Visually Impaired and Blind Persons

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The authors present a timely and interesting article. The literature review tackles the question of mobile text entry in case of visually impaired people. For a review, the number of references is adequate. The conclusions of this literature review prove to be a significant contribution to the field.

The review is comprehensive. The authors followed the PRISMA guidelines when conducting the review, and they carefully presented their used methodology when selecting / omitting the articles. The results are also well presented.

Before publication however, the article requires smaller modifications, but these mainly include text editing. While English is good and readable, there are some hard to read sentences. The reviewer suggests that these sentences should be rephrased. Regarding typos, little to no misspellings were found in the text. The following were noticed:

line 53: "an structured review" -> "a structured review"
lines 85-87: a closing parenthesis is missing

The reviewer encourages the authors to move forward with their research.

Author Response

Thank you for the detailed and constructive feedback. Based on your recommendation, we have revised text throughout the manuscript, to improve structure and sentence composition, where required. We have also addressed both typos as highlighted in the review (along with a few more noticed by ourselves).

We hope that the current version of the manuscript is to your satisfaction.

Reviewer 2 Report

I feel that the manuscript can be accepted in the current form as it was well written and nicely structured. 

The introduction was detailed and provides the reader with a comprehensive overview on the targeted topic. 

The Method was clear and the eligibility criteria were correctly listed. 

Results were exhaustively summarized and critically discussed. 

The implications of the findings as well as limitations and future research perspectives were argued. 

Author Response

Thank you kindly for the positive appraisal of our manuscript. We have revised the manuscript as required, to improve prose and correct minor mistakes spotted by ourselves and other reviewers.

We hope that the current version of the manuscript is to your satisfaction.

Reviewer 3 Report

• A brief summary: the paper presents an analysis of the literature to obtain information on the research design of studies on how visually impaired people can enter data into mobile technology. 
• Article: the information is relevant although the timeframe (from 2013...) may be questionable. Why this date? Also, I believe the limitations of the paper are also clearly outlined by the authors in the section limitations. I question the reasons for some of the decisions taken when excluding/including papers. This may be just a question of the incompleteness of the explanation. 
  Thus, the completeness of the review topic covered may be lacking. The gap is well-identified and the references are appropriate, but may, as well, be lacking, as this is connected to the decisions taken. 
  
  
• Specific comments are made in the document attached. 

• The manuscript is sound and the design is well described, although (as stated previously) some of the reasons behind some decisions are not described in the details given in the methods section.
• The limitations and conclusions are consistent with the evidence and arguments.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Thank you kindly for the constructive and detailed feedback. Based on the review, we have taken the following actions by revising the entire manuscript:

• Addressed all text highlights where rephrasing was recommended
• Addressed all missing/required sources
• Used a single definition for the target population (Visually Impaired and Blind Persons – VIPBs) throughout the paper, and added a paragraph in the introduction to clearly define the term, using appropriate references.
• Changed title to “A Review of Design and Evaluation Practice in Mobile Text Entry for Visually Impaired and Blind Persons” in order to reflect the single definition of the target population
• Clarified that we selected articles from 2013 onwards so as to include only research using capacitative touchscreen devices (therefore relatively modern and representative of the state of the art).

About the inclusion/exclusion criteria, we have attempted to explain the criteria rationale in a more comprehensive manner, and hope this resolves any lack of clarity.

We hope that the current version of the manuscript is to your satisfaction.