It is really great to see Raphael Nunes persist with his GSOC project from two years ago. Speech recognition is an often overlooked assistive technology on GNOME. His GSOC project, GNOME-Voice-Control, is a good proof of concept to what is possible with available speech recognition technologies like Sphinx. Unlike last night’s personal demo, the demo during the presentation worked, and received applause.
There is a lot more work to be done, but Raphael has a lot of enthusiasm and ideas. Now that he has more time on his hands, I hope we get to see more and more compeling features, and perhaps, maybe, have software that would provide full speech control of the desktop.
Overall, I am very pleased with the accessibility-related talks we had this year. I counted so far Sandy‘s UIA talk, API‘s Cally talk, and Raphael’s speech talk. There might have even been a few that I missed. This is an improvement from the last GUADEC I was at, when I was the only one with an accessibility-related presentation.
