Because it's a lengthy stream of barely-parsable copy-paste diarrhea when a simple "Dasher might be a great option! I don't have time to summarize why I think it would be great, but here are some links to previous HN threads where it's been discussed <link> <link> <link>, and it comes recommended by <Firstname McLastname>, a <JobTitle> at <Company> - here's a couple 45-minute Youtubes to not-watch <link> <link>" would do much better.
You're proving exactly why I posted what I did. Nobody else has the time to watch a couple of 45 minute videos (several hours actually), so I took the time to do that myself (several more videos about Dasher than those, in fact), and summarize them for you.
I've had email discussions about Dasher with people I mentioned like Ada Majorek (Google), also David Ward (Inference, who worked with the late David MacKay), Tom Doellstorff (UC Irvine), Donna Z. Davis (University of Oregon), and I've read several papers about it, and also the open source code on github, to understand how it works. So I took the time to summarize the points in the videos, the email discussions I've had, the papers I read, and source code I reviewed.
I will write more soon. I was swamped with work last week.
First, I am very happy to see your interest in Dasher.
I don't have enough time to research another platform. I will be happy to give you walk through the code, and you can decide, if adding Unity is feasible. Is it possible to interface with C++ code on Uniy? There is Dasher Core. It is platform independent. And "all" you need to do is to extend several classes.
Implementing it in Java Script is an interesting idea. You are second person suggesting it. Again, I will not have time to do it. But would gladly answer any questions.
When you wrote about radial menus, I immediately thought of this prototype. Have you seen it before?
D@sher Prototype - An adaptive, hierarchical radial menu:
I better send half of the email now, than full email never ;-)
Written with Dasher and Headmouse.
:-) Ada
----
Thank you for your quick reply — I’m delighted to hear from you!
Yes, it’s possible to interface native C++ code with Unity.
It would also be possible to translate the C++ code to C#, which is a similar language (just cleaner and more modern).
It’s also possible to compile C++ into JavaScript, but that makes it considerably harder to integrate with normal JavaScript code, so it might also be worth considering translating the C++ code to JavaScript by hand, to make it more efficient and better integrated with the browser.
That adaptive hierarchical radial menu is wonderful! Thank you for linking me to that. I’ll contact the author and brainstorm ideas!
That reminds me of a weird experiment I tried years ago: Here is a “precision pie menu” that I made for the NeWS window system, which lets you precisely select an angle by poking out of the circle and precisely dialing in an exact number with a flexible floppy line. I’ve never used it for anything practical, but it was a fun experiment!
Experiments like that are useful vehicles for exploring possibilities and generating new ideas, even if they aren’t directly useful themselves. You just can’t get very far by doing though experiments alone — you need to play with a working prototype and actually feel how it works, in order to decide how to improve it or design something different.
It’s so cool you’re using Dasher and a Headmouse for everyday work, and that gives you so much experience and insight into how to use it best and make it better.
So please don’t hesitate to send me half emails and half baked ideas, even if you don’t have the time to finish them!
-Don
----
Ada Majorek on Dasher:
[I reformatted her inspiring transcript, for people who don't have time to watch the three minute video, although it's well worth it to see how Dasher works.]
ALS robbed me from ability to speak and ability to use computer keyboard.
Thanks to Dasher I am still able to communicate at reasonable speed.
Hi, my name is Ada. I want to talk about why I like Dasher. Since my ALS diagnosis in 2013 I tried countless number of alternative text entry and speech generation methods.
So far Dasher is the fastest and least tiring.
Dasher supports multiple languages. Very important for me, since I switch between English and Polish many times per day.
I really like geeky origin of Dasher.
It started as a visualization of arithmetic coding algorithm.
Unfortunately at the time Dasher was not actively maintained. I was a software engineer in desperate need for a fast alternative communication tool.
Dasher was an open-source project. I decided to start coding. With help of my friends and support of Google, we added many features making Dasher even better suited for alternative means of communication.
And here we are today after almost 6 years of silence we are releasing a new version of Dasher: Dasher 5.00.
If you know people with motor impairments or therapists, please let them know. They will like new features we have added. If you know programming, consider contributing to this very valuable project.
And last but not least, if you worked on Dasher in the past, thank you very much from the bottom of my heart.
Even though the parent comment is useless and off-topic, I am vouching and unflagging it, so my response is visible. Please give MyPasswordSucks a chance to respond and attempt to redeem himself by trying to post something useful and interesting instead of whining. (Although I don't expect he's capable of doing that, so I feel sorry for him, but he deserves a chance to try to do better, or prove he can't by not responding.)
̀However aaron695's sister comment is so comically wrong and off base that it's not worth vouching for, since it adds nothing to the discussion, and only goes to show what kind of a horrible person they are. It's amusing just how wrong they are, but insulting and offensive to most people, so please set showdead=true if you want to see it. We all know very well by now how Team MAGA sees empathy as a weakness, and has a sick fetish with mocking and abusing people with disabilities.
>Donald Trump is under fire again, this time for mocking a New York Times reporter that suffers from a chronic condition. CNN's John Berman reports
Here's a low-effort ChatGPT generated TL;DR summary, to satisfy MyPasswordSucks who had trouble reading my other post:
Here’s the straight-up rundown of the Dasher thread:
DonHopkins jumped in to rave about Dasher—calling it a miracle for people who can’t type. He dropped links to videos, papers, GitHub, and even shared his personal emails with Ada Majorek, who uses Dasher because ALS stole her voice and hands. He made it clear he’d dug deep—watched hours of videos, pored over source code, talked to experts. He went all in to explain why Dasher deserves more love: it’s based on solid info theory, it learns your patterns, it’s openly extensible, and it works across languages and platforms—even VR.
Someone named novosel chimed in asking why Don’s comment was downvoted, saying Dasher really is worth knowing. But then MyPasswordSucks blasted it as “barely-parsable copy-paste diarrhea” and declared Dasher awful, claiming the whole thing was off-topic. He sneered at Don’s effort, calling it useless. aaron695 piled on, arguing Dasher isn’t the answer for someone with a short-term injury and criticizing Don’s wall of text even more harshly.
DonHopkins didn’t back down. He defended his post, pointed out how much final work he put in—no copying or pasting. He reminded people Ada had replied personally, highlighting how essential Dasher is for her. He got indignant about people whining instead of appreciating the depth of his write-up. In short, DonHopkins delivered a massive, heartfelt case for Dasher. Critics flamed him for style and focus. The result: a messy, heated debate between someone who’s poured years into accessibility work and anonymous commenters who can’t be bothered to look beyond a giant block of text.
Excuse me, maybe I am not getting it, why is this downvoted?
I came here to suggest Dasher to OP also.
Because it's a lengthy stream of barely-parsable copy-paste diarrhea when a simple "Dasher might be a great option! I don't have time to summarize why I think it would be great, but here are some links to previous HN threads where it's been discussed <link> <link> <link>, and it comes recommended by <Firstname McLastname>, a <JobTitle> at <Company> - here's a couple 45-minute Youtubes to not-watch <link> <link>" would do much better.
You're proving exactly why I posted what I did. Nobody else has the time to watch a couple of 45 minute videos (several hours actually), so I took the time to do that myself (several more videos about Dasher than those, in fact), and summarize them for you.
I've had email discussions about Dasher with people I mentioned like Ada Majorek (Google), also David Ward (Inference, who worked with the late David MacKay), Tom Doellstorff (UC Irvine), Donna Z. Davis (University of Oregon), and I've read several papers about it, and also the open source code on github, to understand how it works. So I took the time to summarize the points in the videos, the email discussions I've had, the papers I read, and source code I reviewed.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12310029
-Don
----
Hi Don,
I will write more soon. I was swamped with work last week.
First, I am very happy to see your interest in Dasher. I don't have enough time to research another platform. I will be happy to give you walk through the code, and you can decide, if adding Unity is feasible. Is it possible to interface with C++ code on Uniy? There is Dasher Core. It is platform independent. And "all" you need to do is to extend several classes.
Implementing it in Java Script is an interesting idea. You are second person suggesting it. Again, I will not have time to do it. But would gladly answer any questions.
When you wrote about radial menus, I immediately thought of this prototype. Have you seen it before?
D@sher Prototype - An adaptive, hierarchical radial menu:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5oSfEM8XpH4
I better send half of the email now, than full email never ;-)
Written with Dasher and Headmouse.
:-) Ada
----
Thank you for your quick reply — I’m delighted to hear from you!
Yes, it’s possible to interface native C++ code with Unity.
It would also be possible to translate the C++ code to C#, which is a similar language (just cleaner and more modern).
It’s also possible to compile C++ into JavaScript, but that makes it considerably harder to integrate with normal JavaScript code, so it might also be worth considering translating the C++ code to JavaScript by hand, to make it more efficient and better integrated with the browser.
That adaptive hierarchical radial menu is wonderful! Thank you for linking me to that. I’ll contact the author and brainstorm ideas!
That reminds me of a weird experiment I tried years ago: Here is a “precision pie menu” that I made for the NeWS window system, which lets you precisely select an angle by poking out of the circle and precisely dialing in an exact number with a flexible floppy line. I’ve never used it for anything practical, but it was a fun experiment!
Precision Pie Demo:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0scs59va4c
Experiments like that are useful vehicles for exploring possibilities and generating new ideas, even if they aren’t directly useful themselves. You just can’t get very far by doing though experiments alone — you need to play with a working prototype and actually feel how it works, in order to decide how to improve it or design something different.
It’s so cool you’re using Dasher and a Headmouse for everyday work, and that gives you so much experience and insight into how to use it best and make it better.
So please don’t hesitate to send me half emails and half baked ideas, even if you don’t have the time to finish them!
-Don
----
Ada Majorek on Dasher:
[I reformatted her inspiring transcript, for people who don't have time to watch the three minute video, although it's well worth it to see how Dasher works.]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvHQ83pMLQQ
ALS robbed me from ability to speak and ability to use computer keyboard.
Thanks to Dasher I am still able to communicate at reasonable speed.
Hi, my name is Ada. I want to talk about why I like Dasher. Since my ALS diagnosis in 2013 I tried countless number of alternative text entry and speech generation methods.
So far Dasher is the fastest and least tiring.
Dasher supports multiple languages. Very important for me, since I switch between English and Polish many times per day.
I really like geeky origin of Dasher.
It started as a visualization of arithmetic coding algorithm.
Unfortunately at the time Dasher was not actively maintained. I was a software engineer in desperate need for a fast alternative communication tool.
Dasher was an open-source project. I decided to start coding. With help of my friends and support of Google, we added many features making Dasher even better suited for alternative means of communication.
And here we are today after almost 6 years of silence we are releasing a new version of Dasher: Dasher 5.00.
If you know people with motor impairments or therapists, please let them know. They will like new features we have added. If you know programming, consider contributing to this very valuable project.
And last but not least, if you worked on Dasher in the past, thank you very much from the bottom of my heart.
Even though the parent comment is useless and off-topic, I am vouching and unflagging it, so my response is visible. Please give MyPasswordSucks a chance to respond and attempt to redeem himself by trying to post something useful and interesting instead of whining. (Although I don't expect he's capable of doing that, so I feel sorry for him, but he deserves a chance to try to do better, or prove he can't by not responding.)
̀However aaron695's sister comment is so comically wrong and off base that it's not worth vouching for, since it adds nothing to the discussion, and only goes to show what kind of a horrible person they are. It's amusing just how wrong they are, but insulting and offensive to most people, so please set showdead=true if you want to see it. We all know very well by now how Team MAGA sees empathy as a weakness, and has a sick fetish with mocking and abusing people with disabilities.
Trump mocks reporter with disability:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PX9reO3QnUA
>Donald Trump is under fire again, this time for mocking a New York Times reporter that suffers from a chronic condition. CNN's John Berman reports
Here's a low-effort ChatGPT generated TL;DR summary, to satisfy MyPasswordSucks who had trouble reading my other post:
Here’s the straight-up rundown of the Dasher thread:
DonHopkins jumped in to rave about Dasher—calling it a miracle for people who can’t type. He dropped links to videos, papers, GitHub, and even shared his personal emails with Ada Majorek, who uses Dasher because ALS stole her voice and hands. He made it clear he’d dug deep—watched hours of videos, pored over source code, talked to experts. He went all in to explain why Dasher deserves more love: it’s based on solid info theory, it learns your patterns, it’s openly extensible, and it works across languages and platforms—even VR.
Someone named novosel chimed in asking why Don’s comment was downvoted, saying Dasher really is worth knowing. But then MyPasswordSucks blasted it as “barely-parsable copy-paste diarrhea” and declared Dasher awful, claiming the whole thing was off-topic. He sneered at Don’s effort, calling it useless. aaron695 piled on, arguing Dasher isn’t the answer for someone with a short-term injury and criticizing Don’s wall of text even more harshly.
DonHopkins didn’t back down. He defended his post, pointed out how much final work he put in—no copying or pasting. He reminded people Ada had replied personally, highlighting how essential Dasher is for her. He got indignant about people whining instead of appreciating the depth of his write-up. In short, DonHopkins delivered a massive, heartfelt case for Dasher. Critics flamed him for style and focus. The result: a messy, heated debate between someone who’s poured years into accessibility work and anonymous commenters who can’t be bothered to look beyond a giant block of text.
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