[Access-activists] Re: [Accessibility] resident evil

[Chris Hofstader]

> rms: However, there is no reason to focus narrowly on the needs of people
> who can't type.  The more people the program is usable by, the better,
> and that will mean more contributions of a kind that are directly
> useful.  That ought to benefit all the users.
>
cdh: I think it might actually be harder to exclude populations than to 
prefer a population in the recognition engine. We already know we will 
have multiple UI to serve different use cases: programming by voice, 
dictation, command and control, etc. I think that it is at the UI level 
where we may include features that apply more strongly to someone who 
cannot type versus someone who prefers dictation while typing a little.

cdh: A large bunch of the continuous dictation users who want to make  
emails and documents and the like only want to dictate the body of the 
text and use the keyboard to edit, format, execute commands, use menus, 
etc. A person who cannot type must be able to do these sorts of tasks 
with speech and we should do some sort of UI survey to design an 
efficient way to do these kind of things.

as a blind user with RSI, I can say that while using DNS, saying, "Go 
back four words..." pretty well  really sucks if you lose count of how 
many words you have typed since the item  that you want to change. It's 
a strange cognitive model to be composing text while also trying to 
count words and characters that I never quite figured out how to do 
without spending a bunch of time.

> rms: People said we need a corpus of speech samples.  I read that 
there was
> a project to make a free one, and it needs help.  We should be in a
> position to help people contribute.  Can anyone find the name of the
> project?
>
cdh: I have all of our conversations about speech recognition going way 
back to the beginning in my notes. I will be spending something on the 
order of 48 hours in a car over the next few days and plan on assembling 
and organizing these notes into something organized and readable while 
in the car as I will have only spotty Internet connectivity and 
virtually no wireless anything while in the state of South Carolina. 
Other than patting my dog, there is little else for a blink to do in a 
marathon ride, sleep, ride, repeat...