"When the first trials of the Lomak were started I was under an impression that the people for whom it was originally developed, namely those with severe cerebral palsy, would with practice, gain better control of the light pointer. Unfortunately the reality of it was that the opposite happened. The harder people with poor head control tried, the more tense they became and the less accurate the result. Gina was one of our early testers of the Lomak who did not have perfect head control and watching her get more and more frustrated with character selection motivated us to search for an easier alternative layout.
"The main problem, was not the selection of the correct characters but the inability to follow the same line with the laser dot on the way back to the confirm button. It was obvious that with a 26 character layout there was not enough space between the alphabetic characters for some users. The problem solve came from an old abandoned keyboard development where I was compressing characters around a small circle for a wheelchair communication device. The compression was achieved by using an 80/20 split of the alphabet, where the primary 13 characters are those used 80% of the time and the remaining 13 those used 20%. The latter are piggybacked on top of the primaries and are preceded by a shift key. By using the most used alphabetic letters and placing them in strategic positions, the top seven letters spelt the word “notesai”, so when we applied this format to the Lomak centre circle we not only had enough space between the characters but a name for the new keyboard.
"Gina was the first to use the new Notesai and was successful from the first trial (see Gina’s story, written with the Notesai). A re-arrangement of the letters to give an alphabetic look to the layout was the icing on the cake and an addition of more function keys led to a final design for manufacture."
(Mike Watling)
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