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Heya
by Leo S on Thursday 22/Sep/2005, @21:05
With respect to Nokey, I greatly appreciated the chance to develop it as part of the Google Summer of Code. Thank you to Gary Cramblitt and Olaf Jan Schmidt for helping me out with this!
At the moment, Nokey may not be suitable for real use yet, because of problems with transparency and accessibility interfaces in Qt3. But I'm really excited about continuing work in this area. If you look at alternative onscreen text generation interfaces available today, they are mostly boring and uninspired (Dasher being the notable exception). This is not a problem unique to *nix platforms, even for Windows there are tons of on-screen keyboards, none of which represent an ideal solution.
I've used a lot of different interfaces with an eye tracker, and have found that the key criteria for an effective interface are:
1. Simplicity - less than 10 areas of interest on the screen
2. Inobtrusivity (is that a word?) - the interface shouldn't obscure the user's work.

Reproducing a qwerty keyboard on the screen is a terrible solution, and yet there are tons of applications doing exactly that. Why would qwerty, which isn't even optimal for an able-bodied typist, be even close to optimal for a user with an alternative input device? The only advantage that gives you is familiarity, and even that is only valid if your users have typed on a regular keyboard before. The whole concept is silly.

I think the Nokey interface isn't quite there yet, but it will be much better by the time I've ported it to Qt4, and when AT-SPI is more widespread.

Right now I'm working for UVATT (http://web.uvic.ca/uvatt/). Our vision right now is to develop an interface that is not only for text input, but for complete computer control. That is, that a disabled person using an eye tracker (or head tracker or Intellikeys device) could have complete control of the computer as soon as it is turned on. Too much assistive software doesn't go that last step and think about how a disabled user would start the software, or navigate their system. That's what we hope to accomplish. We target Windows, but we are evaluating Qt at the moment to replace MFC. In that case we leave the option of porting to other platforms open.

Whew. Longest comment ever. Anyway, I am very excited about this stuff. :)
  Related Links
 ·   Articles on Accessibility
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Re: Heya
by cph on Friday 23/Sep/2005, @03:47
> Inobtrusivity (is that a word?) -
"Unobtrusive" is the work you are looking for :)
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  • Re: Heya
    by jameth on Friday 23/Sep/2005, @06:11
    > > Inobtrusivity (is that a word?) -
    > "Unobtrusive" is the work you are looking for :)

    Well, to maintain parallelism, "inobtrusivity" or "unobtrusivity" are both quite good invented words. For a less awkward word, my top recommendations would be "innocuousness" or "inconspicuosness". Of course, changing "simplicity" to "simple" and going with "unobtrusive" is possibly the best option open.
    [ Reply To This | View ]

 
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