FASTY – Faster and easier text generation for disabled people

The partially EU funded project FASTY will assist motor, speech, learning and language impaired persons to produce texts faster, with less physical/cognitive load and with better spelling and grammar. Higher text generation rates will be achieved on one hand by using a very adaptable UserInterface with a variety of feedback options such as different selection lists and orders for the predicted words/phrases, different audible feedback options and synthetic speech output. On the other hand a very strong prediction engine, which is independent from the used language, is developed. Based on n-gram methods the engine will use Part-of-Speech statistics, grammar-based prediction and prediction ranking and collocation-based prediction, too. Furthermore, a new technique for compound prediction will enhance the keystroke-saving rate for some languages. The paper will give a general introduction to the project and a status report on prototypes. First results of language performance tests will also be presented.