Re: non-graphical word prediction?

[Peter Korn <Peter Korn Sun COM>]

Hi Henrik,

> Does anyone know if there is any decent word-prediction utility for 
> Linux? I know that GOK and Dasher both have built-in systems, and I'm 
> sure those are quite good, but I just want one that works with the 
> standard keyboard.
>
> OpenOffice has this functionality to an extent, but it's generally 
> limited to a list of a few hundred words that you have to generate 
> yourself, and the words must be at least 5 characters long. The way it 
> works in OOo is very nice though: you type along and it shows you a 
> guess right on the page. With fewer characters entered, you might 
> instead want a list like the one seen on GOK.

I don't know of such a product for UNIX/Linux.  There are several for Windows 
& Macintosh.  They are popular among students with learning disabilities among 
others, especially for people with dyslexia, and with non-verbal learning 
disorders (NLD).

> It would be nice to see this as a Gnome-layer so you could use it to 
> enter text into any program, perhaps as a panel applet? Has anyone made 
> anything like this? Compared with voice recognition or screen readers, 
> this should be quite easy to make as most of the technology. Can GOK be 
> extended to do this?

This seems like a fairly straightforward application to put together - listen 
for at-spi text insert events to build your match basis and then display a 
popup-window at the caret location with your set of words.  You'ld then eat 
some keystrokes (at-spi keyboard interface, perhaps to grab something like 
Ctrl+number for the i-th word suggestion) to allow selection of one or more of 
the suggested words.  You could certainly start with GOK's word completion 
dictionary for this task, and I'm sure there is plenty of other GOK code you 
could usefully harvest for this.

Perhaps you'ld like to take a stab at it?


Regards,

Peter Korn
Sun Accessibilitiy team