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Better Tools For Disabled Geeks?
layabout writes "We've seen tremendous advances in user interfaces over the past few years. Unfortunately, those UIs and supporting infrastructure exclude the disabled. In the same timeframe there has been virtually no advance in accessibility capabilities. It's the same old sticky keys, unicorn stick, speech recognition, text-to-speech that kind-of, sort-of, works except when you need to work with with real applications. Depending on whose numbers you use, anywhere from 60,000 to 100,000 keyboard users are injured every year — some temporarily, some permanently. In time, almost 100% of keyboard users will have trouble typing and using many if not all mobile computing devices. My question to Slashdot: Given that some form of disability is almost inevitable, what's keeping you from volunteering and working with geeks who are already disabled? By spending time now building the interfaces and tools that will enable them to use computers more easily, you will also be ensuring your own ability to use them in the future." Follow the link for more background on this reader's query.
This question is aimed mostly at the kind of disability we are susceptible to and I have been living with for the past 15 years. Even though we have speech recognition, it doesn't solve any problem except writing text. There have been a couple of attempts at making speech recognition more useful to programmers [0], but they have failed. The needs are clear:
[1] A working full-vocabulary, continuous recognition system on Linux.
[2] Tools that don't expect you to "speak the keyboard."
[3] Tools that let you edit as well as create code.
So why don't more geeks work on securing their own future, or at the very least, work to help their fellow geeks to stay on the economic ladder?
[0] VoiceCode and VR-Mode: VoiceCode or is an amazing piece of work. It makes it possible for a disabled programmer to generate Python code very quickly. Unfortunately, it does not solve the editing problem. Even more unfortunately, it's hand-wearingly complicated to set up and get working. VR-Mode makes it possible to use Naturally Speaking's "Select and Say" mode in Emacs — that is, if you can get it to work. It seems to have drifted into non-functionality as Emacs has moved forward.
[1] Naturally Speaking works well, is reasonably cheap, and works somewhat under Wine today. If we can make it work reliably under Wine, it solves the problem in months rather than decades. Other tools such as Sphinx 1-4 are great IVR systems if you have a vocabulary and grammar under 15,000 words. In contrast, Naturally Speaking's working vocabulary is in the 100,000-word range. Any disabled user will choose Naturally Speaking because it works so much better than the nearest alternative. We have people who are injured now and need these tools. They can't afford to wait 10 years or more for an OSS solution.
[2] "Speaking the keyboard" refers to speech user interfaces developed by people who don't use speech recognition. They expect you to say too much, which creates a vocal form of RSI — see [3]. Listen to what disabled users do, not to what you think they should speak.
[3] See VoiceCode in [0]. Unfortunately, today's tools are only for writing code, not correcting code. Code correction is a very different process and must be spoken in a different way: "change index" instead of "search forward left bracket leave mark search forward right bracket copy region." This is also an example of "speaking the keyboard."
This question is aimed mostly at the kind of disability we are susceptible to and I have been living with for the past 15 years. Even though we have speech recognition, it doesn't solve any problem except writing text. There have been a couple of attempts at making speech recognition more useful to programmers [0], but they have failed. The needs are clear:
[1] A working full-vocabulary, continuous recognition system on Linux.
[2] Tools that don't expect you to "speak the keyboard."
[3] Tools that let you edit as well as create code.
So why don't more geeks work on securing their own future, or at the very least, work to help their fellow geeks to stay on the economic ladder?
[0] VoiceCode and VR-Mode: VoiceCode or is an amazing piece of work. It makes it possible for a disabled programmer to generate Python code very quickly. Unfortunately, it does not solve the editing problem. Even more unfortunately, it's hand-wearingly complicated to set up and get working. VR-Mode makes it possible to use Naturally Speaking's "Select and Say" mode in Emacs — that is, if you can get it to work. It seems to have drifted into non-functionality as Emacs has moved forward.
[1] Naturally Speaking works well, is reasonably cheap, and works somewhat under Wine today. If we can make it work reliably under Wine, it solves the problem in months rather than decades. Other tools such as Sphinx 1-4 are great IVR systems if you have a vocabulary and grammar under 15,000 words. In contrast, Naturally Speaking's working vocabulary is in the 100,000-word range. Any disabled user will choose Naturally Speaking because it works so much better than the nearest alternative. We have people who are injured now and need these tools. They can't afford to wait 10 years or more for an OSS solution.
[2] "Speaking the keyboard" refers to speech user interfaces developed by people who don't use speech recognition. They expect you to say too much, which creates a vocal form of RSI — see [3]. Listen to what disabled users do, not to what you think they should speak.
[3] See VoiceCode in [0]. Unfortunately, today's tools are only for writing code, not correcting code. Code correction is a very different process and must be spoken in a different way: "change index" instead of "search forward left bracket leave mark search forward right bracket copy region." This is also an example of "speaking the keyboard."
"Depending on whose numbers you use, anywhere from 60,000 to 100,000 keyboard users are injured every year â" some temporarily, some permanently. In time, almost 100% of keyboard users will have trouble typing" Cite please?
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
"Given that some form of disability is almost inevitable, what's keeping you from volunteering and working with geeks "
I'm disabled.
> By spending time now building the interfaces and
> tools that will enable them to use computers more
> easily, you will also be ensuring your own ability
> to use them in the future.
Nobody thinks they are going to be disabled.
It's as simple as that I'm afraid.
In the Perl world I know one major hacker that has done a ton of accessibility work. In his case, it's his daughter that has the the disability, so he has a direct and immediate interest in helping her.
I lost a fingertip in an encounter with a circular saw.
Later I bought an iPhone, and the documentation was titled "Fingertips".
I've also used a fingerprint reader to try to log into a friend's computer - it said "too short", so I can't blame SteveJ for everything.
I do hope that multi touch input does consider people who have less than full dexterity/digits, but somehow I suspect there are another class of people waiting to be left behind.
I have a friend who was born with one arm and is about as geeky as they get. She uses voice recognition software for most online things (although apparently voice recognition software isn't so great for programming). I know someone else who developed hand injuries much later in life and has had a lot of trouble adjusting. It is much easier for people to adjust to being disabled at a young age than at an old age.
At my work, they're grappling with the same problem. They have a number of blind people working the phones, and their workstations have all sorts of expensive specialised hardware to help them work. The problem is, as more apps move from older green screen technology (yep, there's still lots) to newer wiz-bang web applications, those web-apps have to be created with accessibility in mind. They use JAWS (a commercial product from Freedom Scientific) to make internal applications accessible. As for why there's not much work on the open source front, I guess it's one of those things where a competent developer hasn't had the urge to work on it. But I agree that making computers accessible at a reasonable price (or free) is very important, especially given as a huge chunk of society is getting to the age where this stuff will be needed a lot.
It's not repetitive use of keyboards that is ultimately going to get me into trouble.
In time, all 100% of users will die. Should we start buying coffins?
Just reading your question makes my fingers hurt. Doing what I do every day is clearly destroying my hands but its easier to just not think about it.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Dasher is a great text-input interface: mouse driven, and you don't even have to click (very often). Not as fast as a keyboard, but still respectable.
Heck, I wish it worked for my N800, and I don't even have any disabilities.
What if I do the same thing, and I do get different results?
There are custom solutions for disabled people on the market -- if you have health insurance, you can ask them if they are going to pay for it.
BTW, I always worry about things like accessibility, but employers for instance don't pay attention to that, and programming APIs for accessibility often dramatically increase the complexity of an application. That's why so few applications make use of accessibility functions. That must be changed someday. Thanks for the reminder. If I can, I will incorporate some of your ideas into an easy-to-use GUI framework, that frees the programmer from all extra work associated with it.
My question to Slashdot: Given that some form of disability is almost inevitable, what's keeping you from volunteering and working with geeks who are already disabled?
Nice -- throw out the guilt card right there at the end, when I'm just about to decide whether or not following the link is worth my time. That really makes me want to read more of what you have to say, yessir.
If I was going to work on hardware or software for disabled people, I'd be more inclined to work on stuff for people with little or no voluntary muscle control. What fraction of disabled geeks also can't speak?
[b.belong('us') for b in bases if b.owner() == 'you']
http://www.dasher.org.uk/dasher/download/linux/maemo/4.1/dasher_4.1.4.0inferencemaemo1_armel.deb
I own two programming companies. We work on things that are a) profitable, in the short or medium term; and b) have the expertiese and understanding to accomplish.
I am not presently disabled. None of my employees / contractors are disabled. So it won't help us any time soon, and we have no experience in the field.
Here's the ironic part. I've built three development platforms (one for each type of device that we create). Each of the three "languages" (mark-up, script, whatever) have such stringent conventions that it wolud be pretty easy to develop a "vocabulary" to reference areas of the platform code such that while worknig with the platform code (as opposed to developing and enhancing the core elements) would be quite doable. That would cover about 90% of our workload too.
But in the end, it will never happen. Here's the thing. Right now, it's more profitable for me to work as-is, than to work on accessibility. The day I become disabled, even if it were to be tomorrowb morning, it would still be cheaper for me to hire a co-op student to type for me, or to read to me, or both.
Now, if hundreds of thousands of dollars of disabled clients were knocking on my door, it would take me fewer than six months to build the tools needed for a skilled programmer to navigate through my platform code with simple commands that could be mapped to .V.R., or a joystick, or a head-bob, or whatever. Right now, there are no such clients at my door-step.
What about the LOMAK?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOMAK
GrpA
Enjoy science fiction? "Turing Evolved" - AI, Mecha, Androids and rail-gun battles. What more could you want?
verb-noun requires less typing
Instead of "search forward left bracket leave mark search forward right bracket ..."
You say "find left bracket change matching", which is the verbal equivalent of "f[c%" in vi.
Not quite "change index", but THAT could be a macro for "f[c%".
It is about the law of diminishing returns. It might sound cold. It might suck. But you really need to consider why Pizza Hut doesn't offer Pickle Chocolate pizza... The effort and cost to patronize the .01% of potential users just isn't worth it.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
girls
Text to speech in Linux actually works pretty well according to the people I've talked to who use it, in some cases better than the windows options. (GTK integration is pretty complete to my understanding). Some complaints of stuttering though. Ubuntu, and probably others, even have text to speech available in the installer.
The big problem is that the kernel likes to randomly drop one the text to speech modules thats needed for geeks who want to hear the start up messages.
Braille readers are a much bigger problem than the text to speech in Linux, the old serial port ones work fine, but expansion serial ports don't work right for it, and those are getting hard to find. Very few USB braille readers have Linux drivers. (Which i don't get, braille readers + a command line interface seem such a good match).
Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite (TM)
Given that we're paying for a socialized government safety net, my advice is - use it. Sorry geek, you lose your fingers, you retire on government welfare.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
That's the equivalent of when did you stop beating your wife. Everyone has their own lives & interests - do not expect us to drop them to suddenly start developing accessible apps.
The answer is simple: people with serious forms of disability are in fact the minority. Temporary disability is just that - temporary. Time resolves that issue on its own. Accessibility, as you seem to recognize given your unhappiness with speech recognition, is a difficult topic with actual expertise required. Few OSS developers will have that or have picked it up. The OSS community in general has issues trying to attract (& keep) talented UI people to create usable interfaces for normal users, let alone those that are disabled, which I imagine would be even more difficult.
I'm not saying it's not a worthy goal - it is. But there needs to be some direction & an idea of what exactly makes something accessible. Not to mention that disabilities are unique, meaning what is accessible for 1 person isn't necessarily for another. Accessibility needs to come in at the toolkit layer & make it easy for developers to provide the semantic information so that the toolkit can do what it needs to automatically. Otherwise, you're essentially recreating the wheel every time you want to create an accessible app.
I have a seriously hard time believing this. There are a lot of keyboard users out there - I think we'd hear if there was a sudden disability that was affecting everyone. If you mean age-related issues, we may have to eventually face that. However, the elderly do make up a tiny portion of the electronics-using population. Then you also have to come to terms with that perhaps if you can't use the mobile device you have, maybe you should get one that better suits your needs. My mom wants a Pre for instance - obviously it doesn't suit her for all sorts of reasons, top of which is that the text on the screen would be too small for her too use & the keyboard keys too small as well.
Furthermore, whatever effort is put into accessibility will be for the average user surfing the web, accessing email, etc. A disabled coder is too small a minority to target. As you see, the only ones that appear to be putting in effort are for-pay products because it's a niche that requires non-programmer collaboration with programmers & they can charge enough money to be profitable since the product becomes pretty necessary day-to-day for this niche.
AM USing brain directly to type nowfullstop carriagereturn unfortunately little bits of grey stuff keep sticking to the keys enter
My question to Slashdot: Given that some form of disability is almost inevitable, what's keeping you from volunteering and working with geeks who are already disabled?
Nothing at all and I added Emacspeak to XEmacs supported packages just as soon as I was made aware of it. The demo I got from its author, T.V. Raman, made a lasting impression on me. Being blind doesn't mean you have to be handicapped.
As someone who's been managing RSI for some time, and still needs to be careful to avoid overdoing it, I'd be very happy for a way to supplement keyboarding and mousing with even limited additional input methods, preferably methods which used a different paradigm altogether.
I've been checking out neural impulse actuators, like the one by OCZ, but it looks like they only provide 2-3 buttons, need recalibrating every time, and are only really supported for gaming. Does anyone know of similarly commercially available hardware? I'm aware of research systems which can control a mouse this way noninvasively, but surely it's time they came out of the labs.
I'm also curious about the long-term effects of devices which detect muscle action. People who migrate to voice recognition can damage their voice from the new strain. Would your face start creasing or cramping after a long time using a device which relies on facial muscles? It seems like some form of non-muscular neural interface is the way to go.
Your main problem seems to be voice recognition, and all that goes with it...no offense, but this area is already getting millions (billions?) worth of research and the professionals can't even make it work...your best bet is probably to wait until someone invents it for other purposes and then adapt it.
Some folks I've worked with get so wrapped up in the details or the fun of the project they forget the point- which may be what holds this up. Some of MS's interface stuff for voice and disability is pretty slick - but slick isn't functional and everything is still driven by the keyboard and mouse.
Now I've seen some exciting hardware that can interface to the tongue to display images (poor res) but basically it's rewiring the brain for a different type of input channel.
Who's got the time and money to build these? Not your average geek- and who's going to spend the weeks in deprivation to test it? Well, they might.... but not most folks I know. And if something goes south?
The best approach is to have a brain trust- a site that a research can come to and, with NDA's in place (I have reasons for that) With those NDAs in place then the researcher can say something like "I have this hardware and I need to be able to do..."
And thats when the power of the internet comes into play- the amount of research and pure power that can be drawn down to a single thread would crush through any difficulties- EE's, CE's, IE's, heck even your plain psychologists (if they hang out here) can bring talent to bear.
My thoughts, of course.
If you hate Apple so much, why did you buy the phone? You kinda got the gist that it was a touch phone from the ads, that was the gimmick...
This is my sig.
> Follow the link for more background on this reader's query.
Apparently I have a disability that prevents me from seeing the link referred to in the story.
> Given that some form of disability is almost inevitable
Somehow we got from 60,000-100,000 people injured either temporarily or permanently every year to "we're all going to be disabled". I don't see anything that makes this conclusion logical at all. It's almost as if the writer hasn't really done any research, and OH MY GOD MY HAND!!!!! AGHH!!!!
Insanity is a gradual process; don't rush it.
Please don't mod me troll... posting AC for a reason.
Honestly--my experience working with visually impaired individuals in the past (university helpdesk) was so OVERWHELMINGLY negative... I'd ...go out of my way not to help at present. Four or five blind students, and university disability services giving us basic...legal threats to help them with their problems when it was beyond capacity of our helpdesk (and why would you threaten someone in your own university anyway?!)
To boot--all five of them refused to use university provided services, and insisted on using their *own* tools. I don't mean JAWS. I mean they wouldn't use our mail clients and insisted on using AOL, MSN, hotmail, whatever. Instead of using student network drives, they'd carry around zip disks (urgh). Every time one of these assholes called, it'd be nearly 2-4 hours of wasted desk time on a call I wasn't allowed to let the techs refuse to support. I once had to waste three days of time documenting effort to get hotmail to change the tab order of their login screen because of the assholes at disability services... No--forwarding his email wasn't good enough--he had to use hotmail, and they can't change his interface because then he can't act independently or some shit...
Over the course of a year, these five students accounted for nearly 3% of the quantity, and probably more than that in time of the calls (15K students, well over 40k incidents/semester)--and almost ALL of their problems were ones that could have been prevented. They thought they were special because they couldn't see, and somehow deserved support beyond the normal incident policy. Disability services basically made us support whatever crap they were on, even if it was in violation of campus IT policy. Old version of unsupported software? Too bad...
I know there's lots of better people out there--but the taste has left me with such an overwhelmingly negative experience--I have no desire to assist that community ...at all.
I'm just saying--maybe some of the community needs to watch the image it's broadcasting. If I meet a blind guy in need of support that isn't a PITA someday--hopefully my opinion will change... but I'm going to go in expecting the worst.
I know a couple of blind and nearly-blind people, and there are 3 packages they can use, such as WindowEyes. The problem is, all three of the packages cost $1300 or more. Why? WindowEyes, for example, bundles in French, Italian, Serbo-Croatian and twenty-seven other languages. They justify the horrendous prices of this software on the limited market - there aren't very many disabled people, so they need to charge a lot for it.
If you're a geek and you get disabled, you're out of work, buddy. Compassion is a word not in the business lexicon.
If I worked for any of those companies, I'd hang my head in shame.
Because really, the problem is, you can't just go and "disable enable" a user interface. A user interface is a rich experience tailored to its users. If you really wanted to have computers that were enabled for the disabled, you need to be prepared to have entirely different interaction experiences.
Like, blindness is the worst. Obviously. The whole you can go where you see it metaphor for forms is just wrong for blind people. What you really need, for them, is almost like menus were in the DOS apps of old - press 1 for this, press 2 for this... and so on. And, you need way more sound. Like, every keystroke should produce an audible click and different items should have different pitches so you don't have to wade through the a whole voice menu to do something. There's a million things you can do to make a user experience richer and tailor it to the user regardless of how many limbs they have... a load of details that you can account for, engineering to be done, and pretending that a few add on utilities or even tweaks to a U/I will do the trick is just beside the point. You need a whole new class of applications.
This is my sig.
tin-foil hat should cover most of it.
"Oh Sexy Girlfriend Bonzai" nuff said...
I won't get into discussions about the "nobility" of working to help our fellow man and I won't get into discussions about the "profitability" of developing for the disabled. If you are wrapped up in "profitability" or "nobility", then you're looking at the wrong entity for this discussion and you'll most likely never understand why a person would do what layabout is asking. Note, I did not say you wouldn't, but it's more likely that you wont. On the other hand, if you know someone who is disabled, in your family or not, then you may have a better understanding. I fall into the later category and have a company who's sole purpose at this time is to develop systems which will allow people with disabilities to interact with computers and with other people. While it's not a highly profitable business at this time, we have some items in development that could be very beneficial to people whether they have a physical or cognitive disability, or no disability at all. Our current development cycle has the first two systems coming on the market before the end of this year. The amazing thing is that if you think about it, building a system for the disabled is not much more difficult than a general purpose system. The only thing that makes it difficult is the way you think about it. And for anyone who thinks the possibility of becoming disabled is remote, remember...you're only one head injury away.
Listen to what disabled users do, not to what you think they should speak.
Even most user interfaces for non-disabled users contain serious problems. For disabled users, there are many more variations and restrictions, and the developer can't even use himself as a model and test subject.
It's easy to say "do it better", but doing it better requires a lot more time and money given current tools. A single developer costs $100k-$200k/year, and to come up with a really good user interface takes many developers and a lot of time. It also takes a lot of time with users and user testing, something users don't seem to be too interested in doing either.
Another approach would be the development of better tools and more automation in user interface development for the disabled, but that takes research funding, and there isn't a lot of that either.
Even developing better speech recognition is not exactly lavishly funded anymore and there isn't that much of a market.
Developers have to eat somehow. When they deliver half-baked solutions and inconvenient user interfaces, it's because they don't have time to do a better job or they don't even have the training.
Furthermore, the UI necessarily comes second to the actual functionality: software consisting of a great UI for a non-working back-end is less useful than software consisting of a bad UI for a great back-end.
So, I think while it would certainly be nice if more developers took user concerns and UIs more seriously, that's not enough. Good UI development for small target populations with many different needs means a lot of extra time and money,
time and money that needs to come from somewhere.
At work I've got an ergonomic keyboard, an ergonomic trackball, a great chair etc... However, when I travel, it's back to typing on the laptop's keyboard, and using the trackpad. While packing a trackball isn't a problem, packing an ergonomic keyboard isn't exactly a piece of cake. Coupled that with trying to type at a hotel desk using a hotel chair, neither which are ergonomic, I'm asking for wrist issues...
Anybody got a solution to this?
In response to point one, why does it matter what OS it runs on? You should check Windows/OS X as well. After all, something this important is worth dual-booting for.
In response to your second point, what's wrong with speaking to the keyboard? You seem to think it's a bad solution, without providing any kind of alternative other than "make it easier."
Probably somewhat related: I think the underlying system of "user" interfaces should be changed in such a way that window managers or terminals aren't talking to event or read loops, but rather to object models. I'm still trying to work out how exactly that's going to work for text editors and games, but it's definitely a step towards a more accessable operating system, among other things.
The idea is that all applications provide a (possibly dynamic) schema of all their mutable objects, and an interface to interact with them. A layer between the application and the user will translate it into a user interface; it will be doing just a bit more than drawing windows and widgets (GUI) or putting characters in the right places (CLI, curses).
If that 'UI' standard is made properly, then not only making keybindings will be easy and uniform, but so will making bindings between STT and actions. The bridge between the application and TTS (or braille output) could also be covered by the aforementioned layer.
(btw, if there's any prior art on this, I'd like to know :) )
you're retarded
The speed records for typing in the Guinness book of World records was english on DVORAK keyboards for over 20 years.
there have been numerous studies on DVORAK being faster than qwerty.
Some people are anal and retarded and don't like facts that upset their rigid thought patterns I guess.
Amusingly, a fast qwerty typist can rapidly reach their full speed in DVORAK in under 2 weeks, how the brain does this I do not know.
http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/dasher/DasherSummary2.html
Play with it. It's smart.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
"from 60,000 to 100,000 keyboard users are injured every year"? WTF? They get bitten by their keyboards or what? I always treat my keyboard and mouse with respect, feed them and clean them regularly, and they have never turned against me.
Intellectual Property: an immaterial non-entity, most fiercely contended by those with no proper intellect to speak of.
Dragonfly is a programmer's toolkit for building on top of existing speech recognition engines. It supports Dragon NaturallySpeaking and Windows Speech Recognition (both only for windows, alas). It doesn't implement efficient programming by voice itself, but it seems like the right basis on which to build such a voice-programmer's editor.
Nearly 130% of people will have difficult with basic arithmetic. And over 1% of people breath oxygen on a regular basis.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
could use some helping hands... and lips.
http://voxforge.org/
Why Do We Need Free GPL Speech Audio?
Most acoustic models used by 'Open Source' speech recognition (or Speech-to-Text) engines are 'Closed Source'. They do not give you access to the speech audio and transcriptions (i.e. the speech corpus) used to create the acoustic model.
The reason for this is that Free and Open Source ('FOSS') projects are required to purchase large speech corpora with restrictive licensing. Although there are a few instances of small FOSS speech corpora that could be used to create acoustic models, the vast majority of corpora (especially large corpora best suited to building good acoustic models) must be purchased under restrictive licenses.
California has such a employment law for hourly employees- (grew up there)
many other states have no such protections....
my current state (NJ) makes no requirements for hourly staff to have breaks.
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Paranoiac.
Worse, you're a paranoiac for SOMEONE ELSE.
Worse still, IT'S NOT EVEN A PERSON!!!
Which really IS strange, considering that 300% of world population is North American, of which 320% have English as their first language. What the heck, why don't you simply NUKE the rest of us? You've got the means, and God knows you've got the attitude too... Or, if nuking is not viable, what about modding us all Trolls?
Intellectual Property: an immaterial non-entity, most fiercely contended by those with no proper intellect to speak of.
Lets concede the very dubious assertion that Dvorak keyboards allow you to type faster (the fact that Usain Bolt can run 100m under 10 seconds does not mean everybody eating chicken nuggets will do the same, but I digress).
At the end you have to type exactly the same number of keys to write a word, a paragraph or a novel, and a given finger, nerve or group of muscles will still do the repetitive typing, no matter which keyboard you use.
What we need as evidence is peer reviewed, scientifically done research. If there is so much of it, go on, show it to us.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
There are many other conditions rather than the ones you think are obvious, unless you can proof your point scientifically (freak isolated feats are not scientific proof) then your "evidence" is not such.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
What about this: disabled people designing their own interfaces.
I know it is difficult, but they are best positioned to actually effect change.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Coding good interfaces is hard even for able people. and thinking about disabled people creates far more of a challenges, as different disabilities my conflict with each other.
Text to speech and voice interface great for the blind worthless for the deaf. Making a Text to speech UI where you get good speech commands may not make a good visual interface. (A one dimensional UI model represented in 2d, is not efficient.
The best we really can do is offer a good UI for the able person and sadly a way for disabled people to muddle their way threw, so they can get it done.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
You somewhat answer yourself in the question: "what is keeping you from volunteering...?"
The need to volunteer is. If I devoted my life to volunteering my family would starve and be forced to live on the streets.
To ask a more reasonable question, why companies aren't investing more into accessible interfaces, it comes down to numbers. As many have pointed out, you're talking about a small fraction of the userbase who can't use the typical keyboard and mouse setup. But even beyond that, you don't even define "disabled". There are countless types of disabilities, each requiring specialized adaptations. You can't simply build an interface "for the disabled" because you first need to know how a user is disabled. This means that, in many cases, you're talking about a customized device. That's rarely cheap, even if insurance is involved. If the customer isn't willing or able to pay for it, nobody's going to make it.
A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything. - Neitzsche
I worked long ago for the founder of this company (gh, LLC) when he was in charge of the Purdue VISIONS Lab. They may have some useful technology to use.
The VISIONS Lab is probably defunct, but I found information about it.
News on health and exercise related video games:
http://www.healthygaming.com/blog/
Gnome has a decent accessibility framework and apps. Orca is the screen reader and it's pretty decent, but it crashes too much. When it runs, it pretty much works as well or better than JAWS or WindoEyes (the other option on Windows) from what little I know, but doesn't sound quite as good. Sun contributed a ton of the work for bringing Gnome accessibility up to the level it is at, I doubt it would be anywhere near that good without them. I don't think KDE really has anything remotely at the same level.
There is no decent OCR software yet which is necessary for certain visual disabilities, but ocropus is progressing. There is definitely no decent speech recognition as far as I know.
So yes, there is a lot of work to do, part of the problem is that accessibility is a relatively niche problem, and open source really shines on apps and projects that have wide appeal and thus a larger chance of attracting many eyes to look at the code and to help improve it. I'd really love to have an computer that could entirely be controlled without a screen using the screen reader software, but Orca is not yet quite up to the challenge. But at least it doesn't cost $1,000 like JAWS and WindowEyes and it's getting there.
But the submitter's point is good, there does need to be more contribution to this type of thing because these technologies are incredibly liberating for people with disabilities. Even though Orca isn't perfect, you can sit a blind person down at a Linux computer with up to date Gnome setup with accessibility and show them how to use it and they can navigate web pages and interact with many apps that follow the Gnome accessibility API This just happens to be the area I know most about, the submitter, clearly is coming in from another area, but the benefits are similar.
Seriously though, wouldn't disabled be a far more negative term for geeks than handicapped?
After all in geek terms, if something is disabled it no longer functions.
Whereas if someone is handicapped he/she still can do stuff, just needs a bit "extra" to equalize things.
I found it rather peculiar when people switched from using the term "handicapped" to "disabled".
I am not a doctor.
But I'm curious - do you have bad gum disease?
http://www.webmd.com/rheumatoid-arthritis/news/20090612/fixing-gums-rheumatoid-arthritis
Maybe your immune system is fighting a stalemate battle with something and you are getting arthritis as collateral damage.
If it's not the gums, see if there's some other persistent infection, and try to get that dealt with.
I read most of the comments with interest (having stepped in late). 'Layabout' first asked why geeks don't do more to help fellow geeks navigate around regular computers, when their limbs don't cooperate. It is really annoying when a sprained finger could mean no texting, or no email, for a week or more - imagine how it is when one has no fingers to begin with, or they don't respond the way the brain thinks they should.
Actually, some of the really good software written to solve some 'disability' issues is, in fact, created by people who know what it is to live in a world designed for other people - emacspeak, JAWS, and so on.
Still, it is the simple things that are really confounding. We have found, serendipitously or however, that gadgets like joysticks make cheap and workable substitutes for 'traditional' WIMP solutions like the mouse, and its fiddly little fingerswitches and scroll button add-ons (that look so cool till you notice they are really useless for someone whose fingers don't work so well).
It would be really great if more folk, who have responded so deeply from their hearts to Layabout's questions, could step around and look at SKID, a Ruby approach to addressing such issues. Most of the code at SKID is written by students, who use this platform to use their imaginations in ways that regular code exercises do not excite, because these address real world problems, helping more people to freely and inexpensively use computers, when their limbs and sensory functions don't work the way that computer and peripheral designers think they do. SKID is a place to let your geekination flow - to virtually dump that keyboard, mouse, monitor and all the stuff that sometimes hinders more than it helps.
All chorded keyboards aren't expensive.
If you have a friend with working hands, a glue gun, and a dremil. joy2chord.sourceforge.net has code to turn any joystick into a chorded keyboard. so the cost of a chorded keyboard drops from ~ $200 to $5.