Re: New to List

[Cesar Mauri <cesar crea-si com>]

Welcome William,

I've been working with people with cerebral palsy for more than ten 
years and I maintain the Enable Viacam [1] open source project. Here in 
Spain I'm also involved in this project [2] (web page in Spanish, sorry) 
in which we try to improve the social participation of people with 
cerebral palsy through the use of technology.

In my view, there is still a lot to be done and, in general, 
accessibility is always lagging behind the pace of innovation, even more 
in the FOSS arena. Unfortunately, most "state of the art" assistive 
technology is privative and, often, scandalously expensive, as you 
already know.

As for speech recognition, we also had little success with people with 
cerebral palsy due to their speech disorders (dysarthria). In most cases 
we have to rely on other input methods such as alternative keyboards, 
mouses, joysticks or even switches and scanning techniques. Up to our 
knowledge, best solutions for specialised scanning access and AAC are 
only available for Windows and, in general, privative. One exception is 
SAW (Special Access to Windows) [3], very powerful but only for Windows 
and hard to use for most people. It would great if we had something like 
SAW but easy to use and available for FOSS environments. And this is 
just an example. Also open to collaborate.

[1] http://viacam.org
[2] http://aspacenet.aspace.org/
[3] https://sourceforge.net/projects/sawat/

Regards,

César


El 29/05/2015 a las 15:17, William Best escribió:
> Eric,
>
> I would love to help you with your project where I can.  My strengths 
> are not in writing code per se, but I understand the issues you face.  
> I work with 120 individuals with all forms of disabilities.
>
> How successful have you been with using voice recognition using 
> Windows?  I have had limited success with voice recognition technology 
> in my work.  This is mostly due to the people who have physical 
> disabilities have cerebral palsy which also presents speech problems 
> in these cases.
>
> Access is difficult for folks with disabilities, and my goal is to 
> collaborate with others to create open source versions of some very 
> expensive propriety software systems.
>
> Could you send a video of you using your setup so I can visualize it?
>
> Thanks!
> Will
>
> On Fri, May 29, 2015 at 9:06 AM Eric Johansson <esj eggo org 
> <mailto:esj eggo org>> wrote:
>
>     Welcome to the list. I joined because I am disabled and
>     unfortunately the accessibility models currently available do not
>     help me in the slightest. I was hoping to find the time to serve
>     my own needs which I know would serve the needs of other people
>     like myself with upper extremities disabilities and dependent on
>     speech recognition.
>
>     Best laid plans etc cetera. :-)
>
>     Here's where I'm at and I could use some help.
>
>     the only really useful speech recognition environment right now is
>     nuances naturally speaking followed closely by Microsoft.
>     obviously the main problem is they only run on Windows.
>
>     I have set up a prototype of a working environment where I run
>     Windows as a virtual machine dedicated solely to speech
>     recognition. Then I have a bridge which transfers key codes or
>     other types of speech events over to Linux from windows. Right
>     now, I've been somewhat successful with injecting speech generated
>     characters into Linux applications. I'm working on the next
>     generation now and running into problems with uinput.  as soon as
>     i fix those problems, using the community developed macro
>     environment, we will have a reasonably useful speech recognition
>     system driving Linux.
>
>     What I mean by reasonably useful is that I can drive emacs, write
>     prose and a bit of code. With any luck, that would only be a
>     stone's throw away from being able to execute code on the Linux
>     side as a result of interpreting a grammar on the Windows side.
>     The remote execution capability would put us on a parity with
>     what's available on Windows.
>
>     Anyway, if you'd like to help, I would welcome assistance.
>
>
>
>     On May 29, 2015 8:29 AM, William Best <standard7452 gmail com
>     <mailto:standard7452 gmail com>> wrote:
>     >
>     > Hello,
>     >
>     > My name is William Best.  I am not sure if this is the right
>     group to join
>     > for how I would like to contribute.
>     >
>     > My passion/career involves helping people with developmental
>     disabilities
>     > get better access to technology.  Over the past year or so, I
>     have been
>     > experimenting with different Linux distributions to come up with a
>     > low-cost, stable, and robust solution for the disabled people I
>     work with.
>     >
>     > My goal is to help get features/apps that would help disabled
>     people access
>     > technology in a better way.
>     >
>     > Let me know if I am in the right group for this.
>     >
>     > Thanks!
>
>
>
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