[Osdc-edu-authors] DRAFT: open source stenography

[mel at melchua.com]

Just got some edits back from Mirabai and incorporated them - please 
critique and edit this draft instead. Thanks, folks!

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"Imagine if programming required a special computer that couldn't 
connect to the internet or run games or do anything else except write 
computer software, and that it sold for $1,500. What do you think the 
state of software development would look like?"

I'm talking with Mirabai Knight, founder of <a 
href="http://stenoknight.com">StenoKnight CART Services</a>, one of a 
small handful of providers of live captioning. I'm personally interested 
in this for a few reasons: first, I grew up with a severe hearing loss. 
However, like 98% of the 35 million deaf and hard of hearing people in 
the USA, I consider ASL (American Sign Language) a gorgeous language 
that I can't fluently understand. CART (Communication Access Realtime 
Transcription) offers an alternative option for folks like me; a 
stenographer sits either remotely or in the classroom, meeting, theatre, 
or wherever you are, and realtime captions stream to a projector screen, 
your laptop, your cellphone... it's like having closed-captioning for 
your life.

Second, I'm an open source geek, and Mirabai is describing the sort of 
locked-down proprietary domain that makes my blood boil. The equipment 
and software and training is so expensive that basically only people who 
intend to do it as a profession have any access to it; they buy $1,000 
student hardware and $500 student software (professional software is 
$4,000) and then pay $300 or more per month to get dictated at by 
"readers" at for-profit schools geared towards the narrow domain of 
court transcriptions.

But it wasn't until Mirabai mentioned that she could get me to type 240 
WPM on $45 of equipment that I really perked up. I'm a pretty fast 
typist, averaging 120-160 wpm on qwerty, but hand and shoulder troubles 
prevent me from going at it for more than an hour at a time, and even my 
flying fingers can't keep up with my racing thoughts. In contrast, 
Mirabai explained, steno is every bit as efficient as human speech and 
kinder on the hands, so it sounds like it should be the perfect thing 
for geeks. However, it's been forced into undeserved obscurity by its 
high entry cost and inaccessible design.

So last year, armed with a little free time, a few geek friends, and a 
Python programmer named Josh Lifton, she set out to change exactly that. 
The result is Plover, an open source stenography suite that works with 
off-the-shelf computer keyboards (not $1,000 hardware); the software is, 
of course, free. The Linux version is now complete, and a developer 
named Hesky Fisher has created a semi-functional Windows that remains a 
work in progress; you can <a 
href="http://stenoknight.com/plover/ploverdemo/ploverdemo.html">watch a 
video demo</a>, listened to <a 
href="http://plover.stenoknight.com/2011/10/captioned-pygotham-presentation-is-up.html">one 
of Mirabai's (captioned) talks on Plover</a>, and check out the project 
and its active mailing list at <a 
href="http://ploversteno.org">http://ploversteno.org</a>.

Plover isn't just a straight-out copy-paste of existing proprietary 
CART software; it also has several feature advantages over them. Most 
steno software has a time-based buffer, forcing the user to conform to 
the software's timing; Plover is designed the other way around, so the 
software responds to a human, and typists can take their time to think 
and control the pacing of their words. Plover is also the first steno 
software of any kind that follows the Unix design principle of 
modularity, acting essentially as a keyboard emulator - no different 
from any other alternative input option such as <a 
href="http://live.gnome.org/Caribou">on-screen keyboards for tablets</a> 
or <a href="http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/dasher">input methods for 
the disabled</a>. In contrast, proprietary steno programs contain 
full-fledged word processors typists are then forced to use. "They have 
file managers, separate display and print settings for all text, and a 
whole host of other things that reinvent the wheel," Mirabai explained. 
And often that complexity is not needed. "My $4,000 steno machine 
malfunctioned at my afternoon class today. But as as backup I also carry 
the qwerty keyboard I bought to use with Plover. My court reporting 
software comes with a four-inch-thick manual that starts with "how to 
move the mouse"; goes through to automatic indexing, form filling, audio 
synchronization, and file management; and finishes with regular 
expressions. The software I used today to provide CART with Plover? 
[Open-source text editor] Gedit, with the font size increased to 28. The 
end."

Of course, stenography is difficult to learn, and the "just keep trying 
to type and you'll eventually get it" of professional steno schools 
seems... pedagogically suboptimal; hearing jury charges for three hours 
is enough to put anyone into a stupor. They're also expensive and have 
high dropout rates. "I don't want to be cynical," Mirabai told me, "but 
many of these for-profit schools make a tidy packet selling the $1,000 
machine to all the incoming students, then buying it back for $300 when 
they drop out, and selling it again to another newbie."

That's why Mirabai is recruiting volunteer developers for <a 
href="http://plover.stenoknight.com/2011/04/hover-plover.html">Hover 
Plover</a>, a series of arcade-style minigames for learning steno. She's 
thinking of a simple 2D platformer for one-stroke practice, a top-down 
space shooter for multi-stroke words, dictionary definition practice 
("This might appeal to RPG lovers," Mirabai notes -- "building your own 
word hoard out of the spare parts floating around in your head"), and 
something like Guitar Hero for rhythm practice. "Most people in steno 
school get up to 100 WPM within the first six months or so. Then it 
takes them between two and six years to get the other 125 WPM, although 
I went from 0 to 255 WPM in a year and a half. But if someone's just 
using steno for RSI reasons or to increase the fluency of their writing 
or coding, 100 WPM is plenty fast for daily use; they can proceed and 
build speed naturally as they continue to use the software." Other 
developers have started making training tools as well; Pragma Nolint 
recently released <a 
href="http://plover.stenoknight.com/2011/12/fly-plover-fly.html">Fly</a>, 
a program that allows Plover users to do drill practice with their 
dictionaries.

I asked Mirabai what motivated her work on Plover. Her answer was so 
enthusiastic and eloquent that I've simply quoted it below in its 
entirety.

"Well, there are 547 ASL (American Sign Language) interpreters in New 
York State. (Ed. note: Mirabai did <a 
href"http://stenoknight.com/WannShow.html">an interview on the Keith 
Wann show</a> on how CART and ASL are complementary rather than 
competitive.) As far as I can tell, there are fewer than 20 CART 
providers. Steno schools are shutting down. People are starting to 
consider it obsolete technology, because they're all holding out for 
natural language speech recognition, which has been "right around the 
corner" for the last 20 years. That's because they figure if people have 
been talking to computers on Star Trek since the '60s, it must already 
be a solved problem! The problem is that speech recognition, since it 
relies on matching waveforms probabilistically rather than semantically, 
is pretty much unable to cope with poor quality audio, nonstandard 
accents, homonyms, neologisms, mumbling, and a host of other common 
complications that crop up when transcribing speech in realtime!"

"I know how useful steno is, not just for transcribing realtime speech, 
but for composing text at the speed of thought. And with fewer 
keystrokes than letter-for-letter typing systems, which makes steno more 
efficient, more portable, more ergonomic, more accurate, and faster than 
anything else out there. It's useful to FOSS geeks, the steno community, 
accessibility geeks, video gamers, and speed freaks; my <a 
href="http://stenoknight.com/plover/#whysten">"What is Steno Good 
For"</a> series goes into each of those in turn."

"Even if steno were only used to provide captioning for people with 
hearing loss (and central auditory processing disorder, autism, ADHD, 
kids learning how to read, speakers of language other than English who 
find it easier to comprehend by eye than by ear... The list goes on), we 
need many, many, many more people to do it. I also think that people 
with speech disabilities could be a potential power user base. It's the 
only input system that can let people speak at typical rates of speech 
just using their fingers. We've reached out to Roger Ebert, but he felt 
it was too much of an old dog new tricks situation. If you know of any 
people with speech disabilities who'd be willing to try it out, please 
let me know."

Mary Gardiner recently mentioned Plover in her <a 
href="http://plover.stenoknight.com/2011/11/captioned-mary-gardiners-keynote-at.html">PyConAu 
keynote</a>, pointing out some of the things the fledgling project 
needs help with: testers to try out of the software, developers to work 
on feature implementation, cross-platform porting, and game development; 
visual and sound artists and game designers for Hover Plover... and help 
with making Plover a sustainable project, which may mean donations of 
time, equipment, money, or business model expertise. "I'm about tapped 
out of my own money," Mirabai explained. "I've put about $3,000 into it 
so far, and I don't think I have enough spare cash to bankroll the 
development of a whole game." We've since started looking for game 
development students who might be able to take on parts of Hover Plover 
as a class or capstone project.

"You're a great evangelist for this," I told her at the end of our 
interview.

"I'm just obsessed, is all," Mirabai responded. "I dream about it. 
Thanks so much for giving me a voice. Sometimes I tell people "I can 
type 240 words a minute" and they're like "Yeah, and? Who cares?" but 
sometimes people are like "Dude! That's so awesome! I wanna do that!" 
and that's when I think this thing actually has a chance."

For more on Mirabai and Plover, read <a 
href="http://geekfeminism.org/2010/10/12/plover-freeing-stenography">her 
2010 interview with Leigh Honeywell</a> and check out the project 
website at http://ploversteno.org