Introduction

Communication is a primary need for humanity. While this holds true for mankind in general, the need for communication is even more urgent for disabled people. It is also true that computers play an increasing role as a communication tool. However, in this on-going process disabled people are at a disadvantage. In particular, motor impairments make the use of standard text input devices to the computer difficult and hence slow. For instance, while non-disabled writers have a typing speed of some 200-300 characters per minute, the typing speed of a user operating the keyboard with a mouth stick is not higher than 75 - 120 characters per minute and for a single-switch user this rate is somewhere around 3 to 10 characters per minute. Motor impairment often goes together with articulator deficiencies. Thus alternative methods based on speech input will not solve the problem. Providing methods for speeding up keyboard text input is a better way to go. This is the strategy that has been chosen in the FASTY project.

FASTY at a glanceTo FASTY's Objectives of the proposal