Accessibility of technology for persons with disabilities is a significant matter facing design engineers. Disabled users may have vision, speech, motor, or cognitive impairments which require special hardware and software to make their computers more accessible. The TALK project focuses on accessible technologies for persons with motor and speech impairments.
TALK is comprised of a web accessibility project and a word prediction project. The web accessibility project aims to allow users with only single switch input to navigate the web, and take advantage of context when filling in web forms. The word prediction project looks at the performance of word prediction, character prediction, and abbreviation expansion techniques for users through user testing. This portion of the project also looks at how communication occurs for persons with both speech and motor impairments, and hopes to determine where and what technology could improve that communication. We are also continuing the work of the Augmented Wheelchair project by examining how context aware computing can support other aspects of the daily lives of wheelchair users [1].