[Nottingham] Offer for February's meet

[Mr Alan Carter]

Hi All,

> Questions for Alan (via group 'cause they may have some input):
> 
> 1. Would you be able/willing to give your presentation in March if 
Mike takes the February slot ?

If I can - my schedule is rather vague at the moment, but I 
particularly wanted one group member who works at the Queens Medical 
Centre to have an opportunity to look at it, even if I just bring a 
machine along and set up in a corner!

> 2. What sort of equipment would you need for your talk.  We can get 
an OHP at the church but anything else (laptops, servers etc) is up to 
whoever has if you need to borrow anything.

I just need a tower box I can bring along myself - and somewhere to 
plug it into the mains for power.

> 3. What does "genetically annealed onscreen menus" mean in English ?

Skipper provides full access to everything needing mouse and keyboard, 
for people with a huge range of movement impairing conditions. Many of 
the modes need onscreen menus for everything from keystroke generation 
to launching apps. Users select from the menus using a variety of 
possible methods including scanning cursors and cascades of selections 
offering typically 6 options in each group (with 6 buttons mapping to 
the possible options).

When people have very limited bandwidth e.g. one single detectable 
click, plus constraints on e.g. how much visual stimulation they can 
handle because of impact brain injuries, optimising the menu layouts 
ends up an NP hard problem of the same class as the classic travelling 
salesman problem. When we move a letter near to other letters that it 
is commonly used with, we increase the distance between all the other 
letter combinations on either side of the new position.

Genetic annealing techniques are really useful for problems like that, 
and very simple to implement. Check out http://www.pmsi.fr/gafxmpa.htm 
for a very accessible introduction to this stuff.

All the best,

Alan

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