Plover: Freeing Stenography

Mirabai Knight is a Certified CART Provider (realtime stenographer for the deaf and hard of hearing) in New York City. When she was 11, her older brother introduced her to the concept of free software. At the time she mocked him for being a soppy idealist, but the idea quietly took root, and now 18 years later she’s thrilled to be responsible for launching the world’s first free stenographic keyboard emulator.

Leigh: I’m very excited to be able to pick the brains of open source pioneer Mirabai Knight, whose project Plover just had their initial public release. Can you tell us about Plover and stenography?

Mirabai: I’ve been geek-identified and hacker-adjacent all my life, but never actually wound up learning how to code until, after years of frustration with the DRM-riddled $4,000 proprietary steno program I use in my CART business, I decided that the world needed free steno software, and that if I didn’t get it going, it probably wouldn’t happen. That might sound conceited, but the overlap between the stenographic and computer geek worlds is bafflingly small, considering how vital efficient text entry is to virtually every tech field.

Before Plover, the price of even a bare bones computerized steno system was around $1,500, so only people who intended to go into a stenographic career (court reporting, captioning, or CART) could justify the expense. There were no opportunities for amateurs, tinkerers, or dabblers, and it frustrated me, because I could see so many non-commercial applications for stenographic technology. That’s when I decided to start up The Plover Project. I knew I needed someone who could wrangle both hardware and software, and I was hoping I could get some elementary instruction in Python along the way. By a great stroke of luck, Joshua Harlan Lifton, a freelance programmer with extensive hardware hacking experience, was renting space two floors above my Brooklyn coworking co-op, and after noticing the call for a Python tutor/developer that I posted on the building’s elevator corkboard, he enthusiastically agreed to help out with the project. A little less than a year later, we have an actual functional realtime steno program that lets you type at 200 words per minute directly into any X window using a $45 off-the-shelf keyboard.

Leigh: What inspired you to make this a Free Software project? What made you go with Python?

Mirabai: Steno is incredibly powerful and versatile, but there is a fairly significant learning curve. That’s not insuperable, but combined with the ridiculous expense of hardware and software, I could foresee my profession withering at the root as the current generation of stenographers retired and fewer people were moved to make the initial investment. I thought that if only I could get that baseline price down to less than $100, people’s natural curiosity would take over and they’d try steno out for a few weeks to see what it could do for them. By that time, I figured, they’d be hooked, just the way I was the first time I wrote “The ape sat at the top step” in six strokes during my first semester of steno school.

My brother and many of my friends encouraged me to start with Python as a first language because of its readability and large library of functions. I wrote a very small steno dictionary-building program called Bozzy (it’s still extant but not very useful) mostly on my own, but I knew I’d need a lot more guidance to build something on the scale of Plover. Sadly, I haven’t progressed as far as I’d like when it comes to programming, and most of my input on the project, besides being able to explain how steno works and what I wanted the software to do, has been as a source of funding. But I’m hoping that the continuing development of Plover by Joshua and other community members will let me continue to hone my coding skills and increase my knowledge of how open source software actually gets made, expanded, and refined.

Leigh: I’ve seen from the Plover site that you’re interested in the adaptive / accessibility applications of steno. What are some of the possibilities you envision there?

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