#Predictive writing software download
Availabilityĭasher is free and quick to download from the Cambridge University Inference Group website. VisualĪlthough the letters can be made much larger the program still requires good visual skills, especially at quickly recognising letter shapes and determining their positions relative to one another. Actually it's surprisingly easy for people with good literacy skills and concentration and can actually be quite fun. In fact a quick glance at the program can be very de-motivating as it looks extremely complex and difficult to use. CognitiveĪ user's cognitive abilities need to be taken into account as Dasher requires a lot of concentration to learn and stick at. Playing around with the settings in the program doesn't seem to produce any completely understandable results. For those with decent head movement a head pointer could provide a cheaper, and more established, solution.ĭasher's latest release, version 4, is switch-accessible but I am unable to find any documentation on this.
Although these systems are in their infancy a few are emerging that, coupled with Dasher, could provide severely disabled people with a method of producing text in a fast and comfortable manner. It can be accessed using any pointing device but people are particularly excited about the use of eye tracking technologies. Access Physicalĭasher is designed to help people with physical difficulties and therefore this is where it is most accessible. The screenshot here demonstrates how after typing 'techn' the program makes it far easiest to end the word with 'ology' and then a space ( _ ).
As with some other programs, Dasher automatically learns new words and adjusts its prediction engine accordingly. As well as the standard alphabet Dasher also supports spaces, carriage returns and punctuation. For example if you zoom into a Q then by far the largest letter to come next, and consequently the easiest and quickest to select, will be U. The program employs an intelligent prediction engine that is used to define the size of subsequent letters.