Hi all,
I was lucky enough to go to ISAAC2010 recently and noticed a couple of
talks on RSVP - Rapid Serial Visual Presentation. Unfortunately I was
only there for 2 days and this didn't coincide with the actual
presentations on RSVP !
I'd never heard of it before, but did a bit of reading. Essentially
RSVP is scanning, except only one item is visually presented at a
time, rather than going through an onscreen grid. I suppose it is like
doing auditory only scanning really. Scanning with a grid has the
advantages of allowing the user to visually anticpate all the options
and navigate without needing to memorise the grid, but there seem to
be some potential advantages to RSVP too.
Its not a new technique, it has been advocated for various AT purposes
since at least the 80's. For example in dyslexia there were arguments
that presenting one word at a time very quickly allowed reading at
high speeds without the complexity of seeing a whole sentence at once
and having problems with word order. The recent come-back of RSVP is
tied in with Brain Computer Interfacing, with the proposal that the
selection of an item could be at an almost subconscious level if some
positive recognition signal could be determined from BCI.
However, there are some potential advantages for standard switch based
scanning, either for users with poor vision who need very large text
or images, but don't want to use purely auditory scanning, or for
potential use of visual scanning on mobile devices where squeezing a
whole grid onto a small screen can make it visually difficult.
Anyway, to cut a very long story short, my questions are these....
1) Has anybody in the UK used RSVP with clients, if so, what do you
and they think about it ?
2) Does anybody know of any software for doing this with standard
switch input ? Or any way of simulating this with any of the switch
scanning packages, or anything else ?
I'm interested to try it just for personal interest, but also by
coincidence, we have just got a patient who would benefit from
scanning but has severe visual problems, but possibly not the
cognition to manage purely auditory scanning and RSVP seemed like one
potential solution to try, if we could just work out the software to
do it with.
Thanks
Gary
Gary Derwent
Compass - Electronic Assistive Technology Service
Royal Hospital for Neuro-disability
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