Plover Blog

This sounds pretty neat; a handful of modest little adjustments that could prevent a lot of headaches. Being able to instantly take Colemak with me to any computer would be amazing (although carrying a keyboard around everywhere I use a computer sounds iffy).

Now I've said some positive things, so I'm going to nitpick. This is HN, after all.

The first thing that stands out to me is that it doesn't seem like a lot of attention has been paid to ergonomic details. The lowest hanging fruit here, which I've never seen in any keyboard, is to put feet on the side toward the user. In almost all cases, the way I've seen people's desks set up is such that there is no way for them to have a neutral wrist position (wrists not bending up). Worse yet, keyboards invariably have those little feet on the back, and people assume they should use them, which causes them to bend their wrists up even more. Ideally, a keyboard would let you fine tune its slope so that you can set it up exactly to your needs, although I have no idea how you would build that conveniently.

The second nitpick is with something Atwood says on the linked page:

> Nothing lets you get your thoughts out of your brain and into words faster and more efficiently than a well made keyboard.

Technically that is true, in the sense that a stenotype is technically a keyboard. But the reason I'm picking this nit is that as someone who has made it a side quest to find something better than a standard computer keyboard, this is a…

That was really cool. Thanks for the link.

I liked the discussion of unicode/multilingual stuff (brief and inconclusive though it was). Basically it sounded like if a language has a steno solution then this could work for it.

I liked the demos and the going over of the chords that were typed in to make the various outputs.

I liked the accessibility and efficiency side of things.

I really liked the conversational speech engine thing.

At first, I was a bit uncomfortable with how fast she was talking (it was very rapid fire), but she even addressed that (in giving the same presentation previously, she'd run out of time).

I liked the low cost aspect of it.

I thought her idea of a game (RPG or MUD) to learn how to type steno was interesting. I looked at the project website (http://plover.stenoknight.com/) and didn't see the game yet, so I am guessing nobody has taken up that torch yet.

I am skeptical about the keyboard as a long term input device, but I've been using it for 25+ years now, and it doesn't seem to be going away just yet.

Here's a site with an n-key rollover test, which should tell you if your keyboard will support this sort of stuff natively: http://www.gigahype.com/nkey-rollover-test-page/

I noticed that my keyboard supported, in some cases, up to 8 characters are a time -- but if I tried to hold WASD all down at the same time, it failed. So I guess it's not an n-key rollover supporting keyboard. (I vaguely remember reading something about this and how…

You won't type faster than you think. Are you inhibiting yourself, judging the worth of your output, shaping your sentences as you’re laying them down? Try free-writing: writing anything, as long as it's English (not random letters), not censoring anything, nonsense or sense welcome indifferently. What's the fastest you can write without putting on the brakes to judge? That would be the upper limit of your dexterity.

Your gear counts. I remember the IBM Selectric II, the one with the ball. The whirr and strike, the hum of the machine waiting if you paused to ponder, encouraged typing. Most computer keyboards today make an annoying noise, even thought it might be quiet. Hackers and writers will prefer the Das Keyboard (http://www.daskeyboard.com/). They say the all-black one (nothing printed on the keys, like a piano) trains your brain to touch type like a Pro. I like it mostly because of the feel - the force you need to type an 'a' or a ‘;’ is less than for an ‘f’ or a ‘j’. The Das has a real smooth ride. There's something in that racket that encourages fast typing, like the first few pings of metallic raindrops building to a sustained mechanical storm - all because of your awesome creativity and work ethic. It reminds me of the IBM Selectric II, the one with the metal ball whirring and striking.

Practice is a huge factor in dexterity. I think my typing speed increased linearly from the 40s to the 70-80 wpm range during the four years or so when time I was typing…

It's actually possible to turn some regular keyboards into steno machines, using opensource software: http://plover.stenoknight.com/

Steno produces syllables at a time via chording. They say with a few months practice you can get to 120 wpm, and eventually over 200. Users rave about how much more productive they are when they can type as fast as they think.

"Every word my characters said to me came up on the screen as quickly as they could have spoken them. Before, in the time it took me to type out the six or seven letters that made up each word, my brain would cloud over and I would start second-guessing myself so much it was a mighty battle even to get to the end of a sentence. With steno, most words came in a single stroke, so my text was able to keep ahead of my doubts and excuses and just keep going. I could write for half an hour on the subway going home, or pull out my gear and do a quick 10 minutes in the park before schlepping onward to my next gig. Before, I would have told myself that I didn't have time to get anything substantial done in those few scattered intervals, that I needed several solid hours to get into the flow and mood of writing. After learning steno, I couldn't get away with that ploy. Before I knew it, my 10 minutes were over, but I'd managed to fill half a dozen pages. It wasn't even the speed that helped me do it, primarily; it was the fluency that steno gave to my thinking."…

1) Boston City council may have some legal requirement to make these files available to people with disabilities under some disabilities law. You could contact a group for people with hearing impairment to ask for their advice.

2) I remember when you used to be able to search for a file extension and get useful information. Now I search and I get useless, hopeless, results. Really awful. SEO has poisoned the WWW and search engines are not doing a good enough job of repairing that damage. :-(

2b) Doing a websearch returns many posts made to various forums asking for this media to be made open. Perhaps these are all from the same person on a campaign.

3) You could buy the software, and load the files. (Also, possibly export them to an open format?)

4) You could ask someone at Bountify to create a file-reader for you. (https://bountify.co/) Make sure to leave good information, and an easy link to one of these files.

5) You could ask the makers of the machine to create a simple, limited feature, reader for the files. They don't appear to have one at their website. (http://www.stenograph.com/pages.aspx?docid=757&id=40001)

6) You could investigate Open Source - Plover (http://plover.stenoknight.com/) might be able to convert the software. Or maybe someone could add conversion routines to it.

Anyone know if they're only talking about search queries, or should stenographers start retooling? http://plover.stenoknight.com developer and stenographer Mirabai Knight in 2012 said real-time transcription was far off:

Are you worried that it's going to supplant my
99.67% accuracy rating in another two years?
Or ten years? Or 20? And that's just talking about
the technical accuracy; I haven't even begun to
get into the semantic accuracy.

The Bloomberg article says speech recognition in the lab already applies semantic context to improve accuracy. The article also says 75% percent accuracy from 2012 is up to 92% today, and that we can expect super-human speech recognition online before 2017.