Steve Lee :: Blog :: Project Possibility winners - Predictive On Screen Keyboard

Having browsed through the videos from the Project Possibility Semester Project awards ceremony I'm very impressed by the energy and quality of the effort that the students have put into creating Open Source assistive technology software projects.

The winner (and there had to be one though the vote went to the audience) was the word prediction team who created an On Screen Keyboard that predicts words as text is typed. It uses a data set created from wikipedia and can be seen in action 1/3 of the way through the presentation video as David Richardson demonstrates. Not only does this project provide a useful input device but the techniques used could be leveraged with various alternative input devices to speed up text entry. It could even be added to disambiguation keyboards.

The complete results in order are; Word prediction, SUN FLARE gesture recognition input device, community captioning, mobile currency recogniser (US dollar bills are indistinguishable without vision) and the Assistive Technology search teams.

You can find out more about these and other projects on the Project Possibility web site .

What fantastic work. The projects have developed impressively since I saw the initial design presentations last year. We can expect more exciting projects for Project Possibility in the coming years as more students get involved and take their positive experience of developing accessibility projects along with them.