[Access-activists] Re: [Accessibility] Call to Arms

[Eric S. Johansson]

 On 7/28/2010 3:17 PM, Richard Stallman wrote:
> We would like them to participate _usefully_.  Based on the
> information you have provided, the only way to participate usefully in
> the speech input area in the medium term is by helping replace
> NaturallySpeaking.
>
> To recruit people for anything else would be make-work.

I'm sorry Richard. I am so sorry I have failed you in not clearly communicating 
the magnitude of the task in hand and what I was proposing.

The recognition system, in my opinion, is under 30% of the entire task. Building 
all of the user interface, tools, communications bridge is critical to the 
success of the speech recognition project. Only a very small portion, a 
replaceable portion of the task uses NaturallySpeaking. It is not enhancing 
NaturallySpeaking anymore than Emacs enhances the user's work environment. If 
you look at it from the editor environment, it can be replaced by VI, gnome 
edit, kate, spe, or any one of a dozen  editors.

If we built the system, we would be 100% supporting the free software foundation 
speech recognition product. I'm sure some people were not part of the project 
could add a relatively minor component enabling the disabled user to increase 
the amount of free software available to them by a couple orders of magnitude.

Imagine that, a mostly free environment enabling disabled users to use an almost 
entirely free linux distribution. Without that support, choice is removed and 
they are forced to find nonfree solutions for all their common tools. I'm 
currently looking for a new editor. I've already picked my browser and e-mail 
client (Opera) and terminal emulator ( securecrt).  not sure what I'm going to 
do about a word processor but buzzword, adobe's online editors looking pretty 
good. As I find more disabled user friendly tools, I will publish the list 
obviously elsewhere so that disabled users know what's useful to them.

This whole question becomes moot if there's another text input system that 
doesn't involve any more damage to my hands (or anyone else's) and is as fast 
and reliable as typing or speech recognition.  I believe you implied there were 
some and I'm waiting to hear about them. I would love to give them a shot 
because I am also tired of being dependent on nonfree software. I am serious 
about that. I really am tired of it because I want to make it do things on my 
terms, not theirs.

Seriously, if there's anyway I can educate you as to the magnitude of the cliff 
you are getting ready to drive off of, let me know. I will spend the time, the 
energy, what ever it takes.   I have seen two maybe three projects try to tackle 
what you are tackling now and they have failed miserably.

I am not just throwing stones. I want this to succeed but so far, you haven't 
laid out any sort of a plan indicating a path to success. This is not a project 
where you can just start cutting code and debug your way to a working 
application. It takes a lot of careful thought, careful planning from more 
disciplines than coding.

I've given  up on the whole rights of the disabled versus free software 
discussion but strictly a technical, "make this project succeed" level, there 
needs to be much more conversation and planning.  for example, what is going to 
be a strategy for dealing with different microphone acoustic profiles and 
various types of background noises (white noise, impulse etc.)?  how are you 
going to do with the current inadequacies of the linux recognition environment? 
Are you going to deal with speech recognition on a machine distant from the 
user? Heck, I haven't even seen that solve for any of the blind support systems. 
They seem to assume that the machine the user is a machine the applications run on.

I will continue to support the UI side if somebody's willing to write code for 
me. I will give you my thinking and design efforts without any question but 
please, work out a plan, make it public with all the resources you need fully 
known. Reference existing recognition engines and show how you've got someone  
with the knowledge or someone willing to train themselves to get the knowledge 
necessary to handle those subsystems. Once that happens, I will have confidence 
that you are serious and this project has a chance at success and I know my 
efforts, my contributions won't be wasted.