My mom had ALS, and used single-switch input for a while, after typing and writing on paper weren't possible. She wrote out little notes about what she was thankful for, prayers, practical messages (she had Type 1 diabetes, and told folks her insulin doses), and recipes this way. Eventually she had to switch to giving messages to a human holding a letter board by looking towards them for 'yes' and away for 'no'--cameras or Hawking's infrared-laser-based system weren't really feasible.<p>We looked at some software called EZ Keys from a company called Words Plus. (I don't think she used it specifically, at least for long--I know she used another program, a DOS-based one called Living Better that ran in 40-col. mode that I can't anything about on the Internet.) EZ keys looked more or less like Intel's thing -- scan rows, scan items in a row, completions/predictions over at left. It even had an option to use a frequency-sorted keyboard like the Intel one, with the common letters pushed to the top left (since those are the first rows/cols to be scanned). Hawking apparently used EZ Keys, so it's possible the Intel folks intentionally gave their thing a similar interface to make the transition easy.<p>It is worth remembering that no user cares if it's WinForms or whatever. Some folks might like a nicer voice if they haven't gotten used to theirs like Hawking ;), but the main concern is just getting the message across. Intel seems to have worked on the right stuff: better prediction (Presage <a href="http://presage.sourceforge.net/" rel="nofollow">http://presage.sourceforge.net/</a>, which looks interesting) and context-sensitive controls. The infrared-laser-based input method sounds cool, too.<p>This is a neat space: an optimization/prediction problem where improvements can be a significant help to someone. (There are also practical optimizations that don't have much to do with the general word-prediction problem: sometimes people have to say things about their care, food, etc., or generic 'hi' and 'bye', and it's good if those are fast.) A Web page or Chrome extension can do a lot--how close can you get to smoothly operating the Web with just the spacebar? the arrow keys and Enter? or plain old typing, but slowed down and using 0-9 for completions?<p>I've heard that nowadays, people with communication trouble and enough movement use text-to-speech on mobile gadgets with their nifty and highly refined predictive input and that's awesome.