[Ilugc] computing for children with cerebal palsy
- From: amartyo@xxxxxxxxx (amartyo banerjee)
- Date: Thu Nov 22 17:07:23 2007
Hi Kenneth,
On Thu, Nov 22, 2007 at 07:08:52AM +0530, Kenneth Gonsalves wrote:
hi,
nrc-foss needs some expertise in the above matter. I remember meeting a
person in a LUG meet who was interested in this. Forgot his name. I request
him to get in contact with us - or if anyone else remembers his name please
let us know.
I do remember talking to you about this subject in a LUG meet. I'm
guessing I'm the guy you are looking for.
That being said I do not have any expertise in this subject per se. I
did spend time learning to use a piece of software and then trying to
teach it to a student at the place I am working.
On Nov 22, 2007 7:38 AM, Suresh Ramasubramanian <linux@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Arun Mehta (moderator of the india-gii list) is based out of Delhi and his
friend and colleague Vickram Crishna (also moderator of GII) is in Bombay
As mentioned by Suresh above Arun Mehta is indeed the person to
contact w.r.t to this subject. I've been in touch with him through
email, discussing the software he wrote that I just mentioned.
They are the best people for this .. in fact they have developed some
software for Stephen Hawking to replace his existing system.
The name of the software that they developed is eLocutor. The relevant
urls about this software are the following:
http://www.radiophony.com/html_files/download3.html
http://sourceforge.net/projects/hawking
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/radiophony/
The third url is for a discussion group about eLocutor among other
things. It requires one to be a member of the group to view messages,
so unfortunately discussions cannot be followed from the outside.
Like I said above, I'm pretty familiar with this program and can walk
people through how it works, if Arun Mehta is not available for some
reason.
eLocutor is Free Software, under the GPL (v2). The urls I have just
mentioned provide a thorough explanation of what the constraints were
that led to it being designed the way it was.
The two sentence version is that it assumes the user of the program is
capable of just two voluntary motions, to press and release a button,
or press, hold for a while and then release. With those two voluntary
actions a user can create text, edit it, save it, etc and/or have the
program speak out what they have typed.
The program is written in VB, and is therefore currently Windows only.
As I recall, I had discussed with you what programming language to use
to port it to Linux.
Unfortunately, I haven't been able to follow up on those discussions
and ideas. I'm still intend to do it if no one else does it first.
I can put you in touch with additional people who can give a
perspective of a would-be user and /or parents and teachers working
with people with cerebral palsy.
I'm out of Chennai right now, but when I return you are most welcome
to come and get a first hand look at the challenges involved in
computing for people with cerebral palsy, and also at various pieces
of hardware and software that are being used, including some pretty
cool stuff that got developed very recently.
I'll be back in a few days. Anytime from the 29th November onwards is ok for me.
arun@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
There is another email address where he can be contacted too. I'll
send it to you offlist.
If I have permission I'll forward this thread to him. Or you could do
the same, whatever you like.
Amartyo
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