Usability

[Nick Hockings]

There is another side to usability: available means of input and output.

My area of interest is medical informatics, especially computer aided 
diagnostics.

To be useful and medical computer system needs a method of input that does not 
impede the Doctor/paramedic/nurse in any way, YET captures all pertinent 
information.

Practically this means voice input on a palmtop.
"pocket-linux" runs on at least two current palmtops that I know (Acompli and 
Ipaq). However I know of no freesoftware app that can do speach-to-text, nor any 
that can do hand-writting-to-text.

Both of these are very important modes of input for palmtops and 3rd Generation 
cellphones.

Text-to-speach is important for blind, visually impaired, and dyslexic people.
Does anyone know of a Free app to do this? Imagine being able to write and xhtml 
 page and use it either in a website, or a Gnome Atchung! presentation with text 
to speach by using different XSL style sheets.


I don't expect GUIs on mouse-keyboard-screen interfaces to change much. The real 
potential for improving usability lies with new types of I/O hardware, and the 
apps to exploit them. The "holy grail" (and a long way off) is natural language 
interpretation and generation. For the time being, precise terminologies may 
allow this to be faked up for specialist apps like medical informatics.

Nick Hockings.