Progamming python without a keyboard

[Eric S. Johansson]

Rony Steelandt wrote:
> http://www.newscientisttech.com/article/dn9066
> 
> To nice to be true ?

its early technology.  It's difficult to install and it definitely need 
some extra horsepower because the two people developing it are also 
disabled (like me).  The only thing I've done to support the project is 
host two workshops on speech driven programming and let Alain stay in 
our guest bedroom.

As I said on another mailing list, this kind of technology is incredibly 
important.  Depending on whose numbers you use, there are somewhere 
between 50,000 and 80,000 developers injured every year, most of them 
permanently.  Those these people just leave the field because there are 
little or no tools to support them.  Helping out on this project and 
making it easier to use and install may mean the difference between 
living a disability and earning a paycheck for a sizable number of people.

I must say however that Python is one of the friendlier languages when 
programming by unassisted speech recognition.  That is as long as you 
keep your symbols ordinary English words and don't try to control 
capitalization.  The easiest symbols are_like_this the hardest are 
CapitalizeWithoutSpaces (six misrecognition errors generating that last 
bit. one is still left uncorrected)

So if you want to make a serious difference in people's lives from your 
keyboard, you can help out in two ways.  The first is helping Alain and 
david in the voice coder project.  Second is working with probably 
myself and a couple of other folks in gnome at-spi land building a 
bridge between speech recognition on Windows and complete control of the 
environment on Linux.

As I said above and I'm not exaggerating, this kind of assistance makes 
a serious, quantifiable difference in the life of people with upper 
extremity disabilities.  I hope people can help.

--- eric