Plover: Freeing Stenography
Mirabai: You can read a long explanation of what I’d eventually like Plover to do for accessibility in my article “How To Speak With Your Fingers”, but the brief version is this: Steno is the only text input system that’s functionally equivalent to conversational human speech. People who use accessibility devices to speak are currently restricted to much slower methods of communicating, such as Minspeak, text expansion, or just straight-up slow-as-molasses qwerty. This means they either have to oblige interlocutors to wait a long time between sentences or to speak in a terse, abbreviated manner just to keep up with the pace of conversation. Eventually I want to plug Plover into one of the open source text-to-speech synthesizers (I haven’t decided which one yet) so that people who use AAC devices can converse as quickly and as fluently as people who use their voices. This would also allow for cross-community conversations. Hearing, Deaf, late-deafened, blind, and Deaf-blind people using steno could all participate in the same conversation with an ease that’s never been seen before. With wireless output not just to speech synthesizers but also to portable screens, refreshable Braille displays, and remote servers for people who can’t be there physically, realtime text conversation between different communities can be as easy as speaking or signing within communities is now.
Leigh: I’ve been geeking out lately on wearable computing stuff, and am really excited about using steno in this context. How can steno help make me a cyborg?
Mirabai: I’ve got an article about this one too! Part Four of my “What is Steno Good For?” Series, Mobile and Wearable Computing. The bad news is that wearable computing is unlikely to really take off until we get the head-mounted display issue worked out, and I don’t currently have any idea of how to make that happen on a practical level. The good news is that, once we get a good HMD solution, steno is uniquely placed to make our long-cherished gargoyle dreams spring to life. As I mention in the article, there are simply too many keys in the qwerty layout to make it both wearable and usable with average-sized fingers. The steno layout, on the other hand, is perfectly matched to the human hand: 20 keys in two rows and 10 columns (plus two keys under each thumb), meaning that a full-sized steno keyboard could be attached to thighs, belly, biceps, or wherever, with a much smaller footprint than qwerty systems and much greater speed and efficiency than the one-chord-per-letter portable input systems that are currently the only portable input systems out there.
Leigh: One of the big hurdles with steno seems to be the learning curve. Is there any work happening there? How quickly can someone like me, who’s a crummy typist, get up to a reasonable (60wpm or so) speed?
Mirabai: When I was in steno school, I noticed something interesting. Even though the school had an overall 85% dropout rate — meaning that only 15% of matriculated students passed the three 225 WPM speed tests needed to graduate — nearly everyone got up to 100 WPM within the first semester or so, and it was in that 100 to 200 WPM window that people started getting frustrated and quitting. Steno is so ridiculously more efficient than typing every word out letter by letter that it’s possible to exceed the average qwerty speed in a matter of months, once you’ve got the phonetic system in your muscle memory. Then, as people start to use steno for all their daily computing tasks, the speed comes gradually and inexorably. It might take years of consistent use to get up to court reporting speeds, or some people might permanently plateau around 160 or 180 WPM, but even so it’s a huge improvement over qwerty, and there are significant ergonomic benefits as well. (See Part Three of What Is Steno Good For: The Ergonomic Argument.). I’m firmly convinced that the best way to jump start the steno learning process is by making an addictive video game out of it, but so far no one’s risen to the challenge. It’s definitely on the long-term Plover to-do list, though. I’m writing an intermittent web series called Steno 101 that tries to gently introduce people to the machine. I’ve gotten up through the chording system (you can see a cheat sheet here) and a few basic principles, and subsequent installments will look at more advanced aspects of steno, such as the best way to construct a system tailored to your own individual mnemonic peculiarities.
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