A Method for More Intelligent Touch Event Processing - Most Likely Widget

Dear W3C,

I do not know to which W3C project/standard/member(s) this e-mail should be addressed so am sending it here.

Summary:

- Desktop pointing devices (mice) have precise, single-pixel accuracy - touch devices do not
- Depending on device attributes, touch users are lucky to achieve an accuracy of 10-30+ pixels
- This causes many occurrences of: User intends to activate widget A but inadvertently activates nearby widget B
- The reason this problem exists is that touch device and OS OEMs assume that the legacy desktop single-pixel precision model will work on touch devices - this is a poor assumption
- My recent experiment suggests that these inadvertent widget activations (event-to-wrong-widget mapping) can be improved
- Below is a URL to a project I did over this past weekend to demonstrate that, for one simple UI at least, an algorithm for mapping touch event (x,y) points to widgets which considers touch point to widget centroid distances as well as which widget's bounding rectangle contains the touch point (x,y) can provide the user with a parameterizable/tunable margin of error border around widgets which has the potential to substantially reduce the activation of unintended widgets
- I might add that inadvertently activating an unintended widget can be dangerous if the widget were to, for example, open a malicious URL or e-mail
- More work is needed to evaluate and refine the proposed method on a variety of UI contexts, but I believe this presented algorithm has merit

Here is a page with clickable presentation slide deck slide images:
https://sites.google.com/site/rickcreamer/Home/touch-device-most-likely-widget

Here is the URL of the actual presentation PDF file so that the included Java source code can be copied/pasted:
https://sites.google.com/site/rickcreamer/Home/touch-device-most-likely-widget/MobileEmailUiMockupWithTouchAreas.pdf?attredirects=0

Thank you for your time and consideration.

Best Regards,

Richard Creamer
Email: 2to32minus1@gmail.com
Website: sites.google.com/site/rickcreamer/
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/rickcreamer
Google+: plus.google.com/+RichardCreamer/about
StackOverflow: careers.stackoverflow.com/richardcreamer