Re: New developments on Caribou

[Francesco Fumanti <francesco fumanti gmx net>]

Hi,


On 05/06/2010 09:24 AM, David Pellicer wrote:
>   I am the person who is going to take over the project and I would like
> to
>   explain our objectives.
>
>   I have been asked to develop the following features of the Caribou
>   roadmap:
>    * change the qwerty layout to have 4 rows instead of 3 (add more
>   control characters to the first layer)(already included in Caribou)
>    * improve text detection using atspi (already included in Caribou)
>    * add sticky keys functionality
>    * add support for word prediction using prediction dbus service
>    * add 'alpha numeric sorted alphabetically' and 'alpha numeric sorted
>   by frequency' keyboards
>    * keyboard fully usable with 1 switch Autoscan
>    * keyboard fully usable with 1 switch Userscan
>    * UI for setting up switch
>    * a mode that is always visible
>
>   First of all I´m going to integrate the Joaquim Rocha's patch touse
>   JSON keyboard [0] layouts instead of the actual specification. As this
>   patch is based on a previous version of Caribou, then I will integrate
>   the next set of  changes uploaded in the new way.
>   For the prediction feature, I will create a D-Bus service using Presage
>   [1], which is an interesting  library to make text prediction based on
> the
>   context instead of the characters of the word.
>   If anyone is working on any of these features, please tell me on this
>   list to avoid duplicated work, and discuss  the best option to
>   implement it.

There is working ongoing to create a word prediction service over dbus for the onscreen keyboard onboard. (onboard is the default onscreen keyboard shipping with Ubuntu.)
At some point, there was also talk to share it with Caribou. It uses n-grams language modeling. If you want to have a look at it, you can find it in the word completion branch of onboard:
https://code.launchpad.net/onboard

The word prediction service does not have a separate host yet, but it is planed.

For details about the word prediction service, please contact marmuta that did nearly all the work about the word prediction service.

Perhaps a few last words about onboard versus caribou. When Ben started working on caribou, I contacted him to tell him about onboard, but he did not find onboard as a suitable starting point for what he had in mind for caribou. Moreover, you should perhaps know that marmuta and I have the intention to keep onboard independant from at-spi to avoid the issues due to a running at-spi; if at some point a dependancy on at-spi is necessary (for example if at some point switch access with gui grabbing is going to be implemented in onboard), the current intention is to only add it as a soft dependancy, if possible.


Cheers,

Francesco