Re: 2.6 proposed module: dasher

[Peter Korn <Peter Korn Sun COM>]

Hi Matthew,

One of the hallmarks of your project has been the impressive user studies 
you have done on typing performance.  What would be ideal, in my opinion, is 
if you were to put together a Dasher-based interface to dialog boxes, 
toolbars, HTML content, etc., and get feedback from users as to how this 
worked for them.

Dasher as a text entry replacement is tremendous.  But until Dasher is able 
to provide a complete alternate navigation system of a desktop for a user, 
how can the Dasher user be independent?  Should Dasher be a companaion 
application to GOK?  Is there interest in making Dasher a desktop-wide 
assistive technology?


Regards,


Peter Korn
Sun Accessibility team


Matthew Garrett wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 12, 2004 at 11:16:21AM -0800, Peter Korn wrote:
>
>
> > The GNOME integration may well be strong enough by the time 2.6 ships, but 
> > I think there are still some significant issues to work out to make that 
> > more useful.  As a standalone application for entering text via an 
> > alternate interface for people with severe physical disabilities, it is 
> > *very* interesting and the performance numbers from their studies are quite 
> > remarkable.  As an assistive technology that allows a someone with a severe 
> > physical disability to completely control their desktop, I think it has a 
> > good ways to go.
>
>
> We targetted menus firstly since they lend themselves best to a
> tree-like representation. Adding the other widgets is in itself fairly
> trivial (we just build a similar tree with the other widgets in it), but
> find a reasonable way to present that to the user may be harder - a menu
> tree is obviously a tree, but toolbars get arranged a little more, uh,
> "interestingly" :) If it's felt that it would be useful, then I ought to
> be able to code this up for tomorrow.
>
> Regarding documentation - the combination of the manpage and the Windows 
> help docs ought to be enough (ie, the text /exists/, it just needs to be 
> cut and pasted into a file of the appropriate format), and the only 
> reason it hasn't happened is that I know absolutely nothing about 
> Docbook :) I'll sort this out ASAP.
>
> (Actually, work's been held up a bit since my 2.5 setup seems to cause 
> Dasher to segfault in spi_init(). I'm not sure what's going on in there 
> yet)