Re: [Kde-accessibility] Eye pointing devices



Hi Bill, Olaf,

Has anyone experiences with eye pointing devices under Linux?

Hi Olaf and Gunnar:

Unfortunately I do not know of any eye-trackers available for Linux; I am only aware of Windows-based systems. In theory a windows PC could be used to operate the eye tracker, which could be connected via a serial connection to a Linux box.

There are some two-PC solutions, where one PC simply pretends to be a mouse and keyboard for the other.

Eye trackers can be fatiguing for users with good optical muscle control, so this may be a difficult solution, and in any case it's expensive. If at all possible, I would recommend trying a head-tracking system such as the Madentec "Tracker One".

There are other possibilities, such as devices which detect changes in skin conductivity, etc. to trigger switches. If your mother can control her blinking without too much fatigue, there are "headbands" which detect blinks. These are not off-the-shelf items, unfortunately, they are research items.

The state of the art in skin conductivity is very disappointing. These systems take multiple seconds to detect a change - imagine a single switch system where each press to 5-10 seconds to initiate.

My guess is that some sort of switch-based device, with GOK used in scanning mode, is your best option. The trick is finding a suitable method of triggering the switch.

You might contact the University of Toronto's Adaptive Technology Research Center to see if they have experience with input devices for situations such as your mother's. http://www.utoronto.ca/atrc/ David Bolter of GOK (david dot bolter at utoronto dot ca) is probably out of the office for a couple of days, I don't know, but it's worth contacting him; he may be able to point you to the right researcher(s).

Also contact the Dasher folks, who have done a lot of work with eye-gaze technologies, and may well have tested them hooked up to Linux systems. Try Matthew Garrett <mjg59 srcf ucam org>, who has done a lot of the work hooking up Dasher to the GNOME accessibility APIs.


Regards,

Peter Korn
Sun Accessibility team

Bill

We need to set up such a system for our mother within a few weeks (for GOK+KMouth), and the doctors don't even know that eye pointing devices exist, so they are no help.

Any information (even if it just a link to a page you remember seeing once) would be greatly appreciated.

Olaf

- -- Olaf Jan Schmidt, KDE Accessibility Project
KDEAP co-maintainer, maintainer of http://accessibility.kde.org

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