Thanks Henrik for the valuable update on the state of the art for GOK and SOK etc!
About word prediction, word lists etc: As I wrote a while ago, I am a
bit amazed that there seems to be so little available of these and
related tools for support for people with writing and reading problems.
There is a range of quite established tools and techniques on the
Windows and Mac platforms that seem to be largely lacking in the
FLOSS-Linux environment. This is a bit strange, as this concerns the
largest area of special needs in education, and it must be a problem
when trying to promote FLOSS learning platforms for schools.
It is not just a matter of finding the most efficient system for text
entry, but a need for a range of word list/prediction/language tools -
ideally connected by some interaction standards - to be able to provide
tailored support for a range of mixed needs in the accessibility and
educational area - including cognitive support.
Ideally these tools should be developed as modules that can be used
either as add-on tools for direct use with standard apps - for keyboard
users, or hooked in as add-on functionality in on-screen keybords etc.
This is the approached we used for SAW, cooperating with developers of
pred. and wordlist programs to make these capable of being hooked up to
SAW as an alternative UI - e.g. Prophet, WordAid, and Penfriend. I
think this is an approach that should be considered for SOK. I'll try
to enter this on the wish list when I'm back at work in a weeks time or
so.
Cheers,
Mats
From just looking at the website SAW looks very interesting. I'll
reboot to Windows and test it later.
I don't think we would use any of the SAW code directly in SOK since
it's written in a completely different language. We will certainly look
at it and take ideas from there though.
We are already going down the same path in some respects. We will be
adding macro features that can perform repeated tasks in different
programs and the layout and key selection can also be altered by the user.
I don't think we will do very much with it to improve the accessibility
of general applications, because those applications should themselves
have better access. Instead of creating workarounds in SOK, and Orca,
and Dasher, etc, etc, we would rather contact the maintainers of the
relevant applications and ask them to improve it. If it's a small thing
then the response is usually very good and you then also raise awareness
for the longer term. IMO it's a cleaner way to fix things. If that fails
though, we can make adaptive scripts like Orca does.
About GOK and SOK: GOK is a mature project, having been around for 5
years, but it's gotten a bit stale IMO. It does have support for word
prediction and can be used to control other applications as long as they
use AT-SPI (as all GTK+ apps should and all KDE4 apps will).
SOK is a much younger project, of only about 3 months, having been
started in large part as a response to the lack of change in GOK. We've
focused on basic text entry for now, but its design is flexible. Adding
macros, images and sounds should be quite straight forward.
So I agree that GOK has many problems (esp. in usability compared with
alternatives on Windows and Mac. It was in part to improve on that we
started SOK, though that has a long way to go as well.
Feel free to add feature requests under 'Wishlist items' here:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Accessibility/Projects/SOK
On word-prediction: I don't think that word prediction as it is done now
is very efficient. I have ideas on improving that but that would require
a few more pages of text :)
- Henrik