You may notice that my ideas are shorter and more to the point of many others. Its because I'm mostly only using two fingers and still making lots of typos that I have to go back and fix.
So understand that when I suggest that it would be nice to be able to send text messages by voice (as I suggest in a different idea), its from the perspective of someone who has a fair amount of difficulty.
Computers allow us to provide translations of documents into other languages easily for those that may speak english but understand another language better, they should also make it easier for everyone no matter what their disability to interact with their government more efficiently.
There should also be a simplification process. I'm not sure how this could be done but if you were reading a document in complicated legal language and couldn't understand it you might click a reostat in the menu that somehow simplifies what your reading. Keep on clicking and it becomes simpler and easier to understand.
Comments (6)
I type with only 2 fingers although I have all of my fingers, but I understand what you mean. Actually there is software called Dragon Naturally Speaking that automaticly types what you say. It would be nice if there was more than just that software to choose from. Also the price is a bit up there..$100-$200 depending on where you buy it from! The translation software would be really good, mostly because legal and government documents I think are meant to confuse people so that they don't question it. Maybe a software programmer on this site could start on such programs and make them open source and/or freeware?!
Voice recognition technology works much better if it is trained for each voice that uses it. There are no real cost savings from trying to do it at a central location. It's one thing to train a computer to recognize a few words and numbers in a range of voices, but general voice recognition for all words is still in development. In another 5 or 10 years, a centralized service might make good sense. (I used viavoice a decade ago when I had bad tendonitis.)
I think one of the more promising technologies coming your way will be face tracking technology, where you can use 6 DOF head motion, eyebrow expression (left and right), eye expression (L-R blink), and mouth shape to control the computer. IT can be used for scrolling, pointing, clicking, etc. below is a demonstration using it for sophsticated game control
game controls using head tracking
more videos
http://www.seeingmachines.com/product/faceapi/faceapi-videos/
I'd like to have my cell phone respond to voice. Even if I had to spell words out when texting or say the numbers it would help a lot.
What is needed is software designed by disabled software designers. So often the software designed by someone who has full usage just misses the point and makes things unusually difficult.
The other thing is everyone who is disabled is subtly different from every other disabled person. There should be a number of solutions not just one. Perhaps you could take this "learning process" to a new level by designing a computer to learn a persons disability.
Dragon Naturally speaking doesn't work on my mac and it has many other benefits that I cant abandon. If there was voice recognition software that worked on all computers that would be better.
I like this idea of a "reostat" that you mention. Tat could be implemented with AI summarizers like Copernicus, where you can actually choose the level of summarization of content down to a single sentence.