A User Ability Assessment Tool (UAAT) was developed to collect data about basic user performance, such as typing speed, or reaction time. The program supports standard input devices as well as special input devices connected via serial port and the prototype of the pressure sensitive keyboard developed by IKuT. The collected information is used to determine the applicability of further tests to the situation of the user. It is also used to get an impression of the users current hardware and software status and the way text input is written.
The results from the questionnaires and the User Ability Assessment Tool do not show a uniform picture of the potential users. There is a wide variety of abilities and demands. Although FASTY will not contain communication assistance, the desire for an appropriate support was expressed.
The language component requires big amounts of text for building user-adapted dictionaries. The TCT was built with this aim in mind. It will be used during the development phase for the collection of text from the Internet and from the users. Later versions will be integrated in the Adjustment tool and will be used to adjust the general dictionaries to the special needs of a user; this adjustment will be part of the installation process. An important feature of the TCT is its ability to anonymise the texts so that they cannot be traced back to the author.
A user simulation tool will help the UI and LC developers to evaluate different algorithms and settings. Later commercial versions may help carers to find the best settings for the primary users in an iterative way without burdening the primary user himself with the testing of all possible settings and options.
A word prediction tool has been developed to support the continuous development of the language component. Currently, it includes the core langue functionality of the FASTY system (n-gram prediction), the automatic acquisition of n-grams from corpora, and the morphology module. The tool is in daily use at the three language development sites (ÖFAI - German, MULT - Dutch and French, UU - Swedish). By means of SWP, base-lines for the core functionality for the four languages have been set in terms of keystroke savings for different parameter settings of the program. As new functionality is added to the SWP, it will be possible to study how the predictive power and precision increases with the integration of new functionality with respect to the four languages.