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Dkey

Dkey is disambiguation software for computers - it works in a similar way to 'predictive text' on your mobile phone. It is designed to allow quicker text input for people with physical disabilities who can use a keyboard with a small number of keys, for example a number pad keyboard. It can also be used with mouse input, or with switch input via other software. It is designed with people with disabilities in mind, but could be used by anyone.

Latest release: Dkey 0.0.3

You must read the disclaimer before downloading.

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Download Dkey for Windows (10 MB): Installer
Download Dkey for all platforms (4.7M): Source Tarball

Feature complete for the target user - Read more

How does it work?

If you use a mobile phone and have tried predictive text (also known as T9), you will probably recognise how Dkey works. Basically: NumPad

each key has more than one letter on it
you press the key with the letter you want and spell the word
the software looks up which words are possible from those keys and displays them in the list
normally (about 80% of the time) the software will have your word first and you just press space to finish the word

What can I use to type?

With Dkey you can use any number of keys to type - 'out of the box' it is setup to work with a number pad keyboard.

For example someone with Muscular Dystropy could use this mouse/number pad to type: MouseNumPad

... or someone with cerebral palsy might want to use this keypad to type: Number pad with keyguard

You can also use the mouse by clicking on the on-screen-keyboard on the Dkey software: Dkey Keyboards

Who made this?

DKey is an open source project, it is based on the Tapir project, created by Piotr Zielinski. Dkey builds on Tapir by adding keyboard access - so it can be used by a number pad keyboard on a computer - and voice feedback (as well as some other things). Dkey was comisioned by the Simon Judge of the Barnsley AT Team and implemented by Steve Lee of Full Measure.

Can I help? Where can I find out more?

Sure, please, if you are a programmer and want to help improve Dkey, or if you have used Dkey and have some ideas - just go to the development pages and contribute there.

Testing Dkey and suggestions

Posted by David Colven at 2008-11-13 11:30

I tried verssion .2 and could not get it to work properly. When I used 0 to send a word to notepad the word was sent but the text area would not clear. Space did not seem to work.

Version 0.3 fixes this

Posted by Simon Judge at 2008-11-13 14:23

Hi David,

Thanks for trying this! Download the latest version for a fix for this. It would be great if we could use SAW directly so we could use this for a switch interface. If could tell us how to do this/open the code that would be great.

Simon

Suggestion

Posted by David Colven at 2008-11-13 11:32

SAW 5 works well with Dkey in so far as it works with the keyboard. It would be useful if it could send words to SAW as WordAid does, so that we would only have to have one visible windows on screen. I think we could release the source code for WordAid for this purpoe if that would help.

Suggestion

Posted by Steve Lee at 2008-11-13 18:04

0.0.3 is out and fixes quite a few problems. It includes the tapir dictionary by default. Pointer input is still not working as it becomes the active app and s the destination for text (that's a high priority bug).

Can you expand on the WordAid requirements?

Punctuation

Posted by Vicky Johnson at 2009-07-01 13:02

Hello,

I'm using Version 0.0.3 of DKey and I've noticed that when you press '3' for punctuation a space is left between the last word of the sentence and the full stop etc. Is it possible to overide this? Also, how do you add more punctuation characters to the suggestion list - I couldn't see any in wordlist.txt.

Thanks, Vicky

Re- punctuation

Posted by Steve Lee at 2009-07-02 11:34

Vicky, thanks for comments. For now both are built in to DKey. We could make the automatic space a little more intelligent and also move the list of punctuation chars to a configuration file. Out of interest what extra punct. characters do you want?

Steve

RE: Punctuation

Posted by Vicky Johnson at 2009-07-02 17:26

Hi Steve, that would be great. The client I would like to use DKey with is at Secondary School and I would like him to be able to access as many characters as possible, including @, brackets and speech marks.

Thanks, Vicky