eLocutor was always intended as a rapid application development (RAD) project,[||] something that would allow me to show Professor Hawking during our infrequent and short meetings how far the design had progressed. The intention was to rewrite it some time, after the design could be frozen in the shape of a working prototype that people had actually been using and providing feedback on. At that point, I would pick a programming language that worked across platforms, so that Macs or Linux should also be accessible to those severely motor disabled.
[||] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_application_development.
However, inspired by what T. V. Raman achieved with Emacspeak (covered in Chapter 31), I am now considering an entirely different kind of project. Emacs is, of course, not just an editor, but a very versatile platform that people have extended over the years to allow you to read mail, handle appointments, browse the Web, execute shell commands, etc. By merely adding on a smart text-to-speech capability and context-sensitive commands, Raman brilliantly made everything that could be accessed through Emacs accessible to the blind.
So, I'm wondering whether the same can be done for the motor disabled. Advantages of this approach are:
Designers would no longer have to worry about the mouse, for Emacs allows you to do everything without it.
eLocutor wouldn't just be an accessible editor, but would rather make all the capabilities of the computer accessible.
I might also find more support this way among the open source developer community, which seems to be far better on platforms historically associated closely with Emacs use than in the MS Windows world.
I am therefore appealing to readers of this chapter to teach me how to extend Emacs such that the same one-button navigation of a tree becomes possible. Better still would be someone wishing to take up this project with whatever help I might be able to provide.
Another direction to take this software would be to address the enormous problem of children who become disabled in the first years of life, such as those with cerebral palsy and severe autism, who typically do not get an education because they cannot communicate back to the teacher in a normal classroom. If such a child could communicate via software, she might be able to attend normal school.
Here, the challenge for the software writer is even greater. Normally, you assume that a person using a computer is literate. In this case, the child has to be able to use a computer in order to become literate. The software we write must appeal to a child enough to entice her to use it as her primary means of communicating with the world, before she can read. What a daunting, yet hugely interesting task! Of course, the software would be great in teaching any child how to use a computer at a very early age, not just disabled kids. Anyone willing to collaborate?