Awesome Assitivetech

A curated list of 😎 awesome Assistive Technology frameworks and tools to help you develop your AT tool/system. note: this is for tools rather than end products. For those see OpenAssistive

• Awesome Assistive-Tech
  • AAC (Alternative & Augmentative Communication
  • Symbols
  • Word/Letter Prediction
  • Speech Recognition
  • Speech Synthesis
  • Head/Face tracking
  • EyeGaze
  • Switch Scanning
    • Reading material
    • Scanning on the web
• Support
  • Hackathons
  • Email Lists
  • AT Engineering Organisations
• Contributing

AAC

Tools to help you make a better Augmentative & Alternative Communication system

• OpenBoardFormat. Suggested format for open source language layouts/packages for AAC systems. See also the OBF Gem - which works with this.
• OpenLoggingFormat. Suggested format for a logging format for Grid based AAC systems.
• AAC-Shim - a simple helper method for helping web apps that want to support being embedded inside an AAC system. Check out the demos.

Symbols

APIs and resources to support access to symbols

• Open Symbols. Provides api and web front end to search through all open source symbol sets. Powers coughdrop
• Symboliser API. From Commtap. Adds in synonyms and variants on top of the normal symbol information

Word Prediction

APIs and code samples to integrate word prediction into your system

• Asterics-Predictionary. JavaScript dictionary-based word prediction library with self-learning abilities.
• Imagineville Prediction API. Keith Vertanen’s prediction API.
• Presage. C++ based prediction engine, with Python bindings available (Python binding doc and for an example see this example)

Speech Recognition

Tools to aid Speech Recognition

• Python Speech Recgonition - Library for performing speech recognition, with support for several engines and APIs, online and offline.

Speech Synthesis

Tools to aid/do speech synthesis

• eSpeak - compact open source software speech synthesizer for English and other languages, for Linux and Windows
• festival - multi-lingual speech synthesis workbench that runs on multiple-platforms offering black box text to speech, as well as an open architecture for research in speech synthesis
• flite - small, fast run-time synthesis engine developed at CMU and primarily designed for small embedded machines and/or large servers. Flite is designed as an alternative synthesis engine to Festival for voices built using the FestVox suite of voice building tools.
• QtSpeech - a cross-platform library based on Qt to provide common cross-platform API to access and use system TTS (Text-to-Speech) engines on platforms as Windows (SAPI), Mac (SpeechSynthesis) and Linux (Festival).
• Talkify - A javascript text to speech (TTS) library. Originally from and used by https://talkify.net. Uses https://manage.talkify.net/ as a backend.
• Extra TTS - Used to offer additional speech synthesis engines in cordova apps.
• Acapela for Electron - Get acapela voices working on Electron apps.
• ResponsiveVoice - Javascript based TTS - check site for pricing
• Browser Speech Synthesis - which browsers support which voices.

Head/Face tracking

Tools to face tracking

• OpenFace - an open source facial behavior analysis toolkit. See OpenFaceIOS for an iOS version.
• Cordova-Face - ARkit based head tracking and basic eye tracking for Cordova platforms. Currently focused on iOS.

Eyegaze

Small and big projects to aid/support eyetracking

• GazeLinger - Node module to listen to eye gaze events from the eye-tracking libraries
• EyeTab - a 3D model-based gaze tracker - designed for Microsoft Surface.
• GazePointer - SDK which provides an abstraction layer for interacting with a number of eye trackers. The current implementation provides support for Tobii EyeX.

Switch Scanning

Using switches and scanning

Reading material

• Switch Access to Technology - a comprhensive guide to scanning and the various patterns out there.

Scanning on the web

• Switch Access for Webpages - is a coffeescript that enables switch/keyboard control for navigating a webpage for AAC users. Nice demos. Well implemented.
• switchScanJS - a jQuery based implementation with auto-scanning.
• AAC-Shim - a simple helper method for helping web apps that want to support being embedded inside an AAC system. Check out the demos.

Support

Hackathons

• ATHack. Boston/MIT based hackathon pairing indviduals with disabilities with hackers
• Hackcessible 2018. Sheffield, UK hackathon.

Email Lists

• AT-Forum - The RESNA (Rehabilitation Engineering Society for North America) forum
• AssistTech - UK based list with a number of AT professionals from an Clincial Science/Engineering Background
• Access Group - UK based group of Occupational Therapists and Engineeers finding solutions for people to access electronic equipment
• Communication Maters AACForum - UK Forum for the UK Chapter of ISAAC (International Society of AAC)

Email / News announcements

• AACinfo - a monthly-ish email which lists new products, technologies and strategies in AAC. Users contribute to the site and Ace centre edit it.

AT Engineering Organisations

• Tetra Society of North America - Volunteer engineers across North America assisting people with disabilities
• REMAP - Volunteer engineers across the UK assisting people - similar to Tetra

Contributing

Your contributions are always welcome! Please take a look at the contribution guidelines first.

I will keep some pull requests open if I’m not sure whether those libraries are awesome, you could vote for them by adding :+1: to them. Pull requests will be merged when their votes reach 20.