Author: Daniel Koć

A system used by Bauby was based on a special plate with a French alphabet with letters ordered by frequency of use. His assistant repeatedly recited the alphabet until Bauby blinked to choose the next letter. It was a really hard work to write a single word in this way, not mentioning the whole book. With Dasher it would be much easier — unfortunately Bauby died in 1997, the year when Dasher was invented.

But the development of Dasher had nothing to do with disabilities. The idea was to create a system to replace traditional keyboards in small mobile gadgets. David MacKay wanted to find a way to be able to type easily on very small electronic devices on which adding a full-size keyboard would make real miniaturization impossible and shrinking the keyboard would make typing a lot slower.

Dasher needs no keys. It is a graphical application where blocks of letters are moving through a screen. You can point at a letter using a mouse or any other pointing device (controlled by an eye movement or even breath for example). If you pick a letter, other blocks of letters appear, so you can compare writing with Dasher with riding on an infinite alphabet fractal. When you “enter” a text in Dasher, it can make your life even easier by suggesting you next words, since it remembers the words “typed” previously. We can also explicitly feed it with a set of documents, e.g. papers of the author (to imitate his style), or texts from specific domain (a corpus) containing sophisticated terminology.

An interesting feature of Dasher is alphabet independence — writing is easy in any language (in which you can use graphical representation of letters or signs). There’s even a method of dealing with some problems with the enormous Chinese alphabet.

On Dasher’s homepage you may find a simple Java applet which you can use to experiment with this new way of writing words. Of course it is more comfortable to download and install Dasher on your hard drive. Dasher is licensed under the GNU GPL and is available for all popular operating systems. I also recommend watching a movie which is a presentation of Dasher features (it was prepared last year for Google).

It is worth mentioning that Dasher excels other non-keyboard writing methods (like virtual keyboards or dictation) when efficiency and exactness are crucial. It seems to be a perfect solution for modern miniaturized devices.

More information

• Dasher home page
• Dasher in Wikipedia

Original source: Dasher: klawiatura bez klawiszy. Translated from Polish by Paweł Łupkowski, proof-read by michuk