Dasher: New Software by British Scientists Enables Liberation from QWERTY Keyboard
By Andrew Freeway (Andrew_Freeway@yahoo.com)
David Mackay and David Ward, two scientists from Oxford University, have created a whole new way to write with your personal computer (pc). Just have a look at www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/dasher and be surprised. If you want you can have a free download of the program, so you can try it out for yourself.
Mackay and Ward are very conscious of the money making potential of the new program. Especially the Japanese and Chinese pc users are desperately looking for a way to escape the tyranny of their QWERTY keyboards. But they also know that a software inventor hardly ever wins. The money mostly goes to the company holding the patent and the big software firms. They have decided not to follow that path and made it possible for people to use the software for free. Meanwhile, about 50,000 people have downloaded this unique piece of free software!
Frontal attack on the keyboard
Dasher is a frontal attack on the keyboard; actually a keyboard is a very clumsy device, more like a very complicated two-dimensional switchbox. First you have to track the letter, then you have to steer your finger to that specific key and finally you have to hit the key. Composing a word takes a lot of these actions. With this sequence of actions you are very inefficient in use of computer time. Using your mouse, for instance, is much quicker and more efficient.
Navigating, on the other hand, is a very natural process for our brains. As laborious as keyboard typing with 10 fingers is, as flowing is the hand-eye coordination. In the prestigious science magazine called Nature ( August 22, 2002) the two Brits describe how some test subjects could score 40 words a minute only after a one-hour practice with Dasher. An average keyboard typist has a score of 60 words a minute, using the ten-finger system of course.
With Dasher's new way of writing, one navigates through a flow of letters while building words. It is best compared with steering a car over the road. The navigation is done with a joystick, a mouse or an eye-tracker (a camera monitoring the movement of the eye and of the pupil and steering the cursor to the place where the eye is looking at).
Dasher thinks along with you during the writing. Based on the first letters selected, the program predicts which word you want to write. The system uses the same logical models as used in speech recognition.
Dasher offers letters in colored squares. The next letter is a new square within this square etc. The more probable a letter is, the bigger the square. The effect of this navigation is the development of a kind of path through the flow of letters creating the probable word. By following that path the word is created in one fluent movement. The better language models get, the more fluent, faster and user friendlier Dasher will be.
Software benefits computer users with disabilities
At the moment it is expected that especially people with a disability will be very pleased with Dasher. Stephen Hawking, the British physicist, is using Dasher for writing as well as his speech computer. But as said before, the Japanese are also very pleased with this invention. No longer are they forced to use the QWERTY keyboard with the Roman alphabet while their own written language is composed of completely other characters. They have to organize the input of the Japanese characters by using all kinds of codes. With Dasher they can use their own characters.
But the most important potential market is the users of pocket or palmtop computers. Using Dasher they do not have to drag along a keyboard. By touch screen techniques, the mouse or a tracking ball, people can navigate with Dasher and write their texts on their small computers.
Working on a new combination
At the moment Mackay and Ward are working on a combination of speech recognition and Dasher since talking with a computer is even more user friendly then navigating on it. The problem with speech recognition is the error margin of the system. Very often such a system does not recognize the spoken words and repairing those errors is very time consuming. But if you combine speech recognition with Dasher - talking to your computer while Dasher is offering the appropriate letters on your screen - life with the computer could become a dream come true. And Dasher shows something else again: what is handy for disabled people is very often also handy for those who think they are not disabled. But they are so used to the obstacles that surround them that their vision is blinded. Again hurray for Dasher, for opening so many people's eyes!
(source: Henk Klomp, NRC)
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