FASTY
Faster Typing for Disabled Persons

The objective of FASTY was the creation of a system for increasing the text generation rate of disabled persons by Predictive Typing and dedicated advanced input devices. The system was be developed for the German, French, Dutch and Swedish language, the concept, however, is useable for most European languages. FASTY assists motor, speech, learning and language impaired persons to produce texts faster, with less physical/cognitive load and with better spelling and grammar. FASTY is configurable for different types of disabilities, different communication settings and different European languages. It allows easier access to PC based office systems, to modern forms of IT communication and a faster usage of text to speech synthesisers for voice communication. Thus the FASTY system contributes to ensure equal access to Information Society for all Citizens. FASTY is an intelligent system by using methods of Natural Language Processing, Artificial Intelligence, self adaptive user interfaces and knowledge bases in order to significantly increase the key stroke saving rate especially for those European languages which are highly inflected. OFAI's part in the project was to lead the development of the general architecture of the linguistic component (as opposed to the user interface) as well as the implementation of the necessary linguistic tools and resources for the application to German.

Research staff

• Johannes Matiasek
• Harald Trost

Partners

• fortec - Forschungsgruppe für Rehabilitationstechnik (Austria)
• FTB - Forschungsinstitut Technologie - Behindertenhilfe (Germany)
• Department of Linguistics at Uppsala University
• Multitel ASBL (Belgium)
• IGEL - Elektronische Kommunikationshilfen GmbH (Germany)

Sponsor