Milestones | DOI: 10.1145/2001269.2001278
Marina Krakovsky
success at 16
A high school student wins first prize from ACM
for developing a faster keyboard layout.
USING A SoPHISTICATED optimi- zation algorithm, Natalie Nash, a 16-year-old high school junior from Pennsyl- vania, designed a software
interface to help severely disabled users communicate significantly faster
than is possible using currently available alternatives. In May, her project,
which was Nash’s entry in the Intel
Science and Engineering competition,
wowed the three judges representing
ACM, who awarded her the Association’s first prize.
“The project was both socially relevant—it was clear that it meant something to her—and it had some very
impressive computer science pieces to
it,” says one of the judges, Robb Cutler,
founding president of the Computer
Science Teachers Association and a
graduate student in computer science
at Purdue University.
People who can’t speak use augmen-
tative and alternative communication
(AAC) devices that generate speech from
users’ input. Those who can’t type, such
as people with cerebral palsy, use AAC
devices with a single switch through
which they painstakingly make choices
via an onscreen keyboard. The comput-
er scans the AAC keyboard, highlighting
one row at a time until the user activates
the switch (by pressing a button, puff-
ing, or blinking), and the device slowly
zeroes in on the desired letter. “Some-
times it will take a good five minutes
to type one sentence, and by that time
everybody else in the conversation has
moved on to another topic,” Nash ex-
plains. “My project was designed to im-
prove the speed of communication us-
ing this single-button method.”
The first question Nash tackled was
the fastest style of keyboard: the stan-
dard QWERTY keyboard; an AAC key-
board, which arranges the 26 letters in a
5x5 grid; or a standard ambiguous key-
board, which has more than one letter
per key. Nash wrote a program to com-
pare the three keyboards’ efficiency at
processing the 20,000 most commonly
spoken words in American English.
Contrary to her hunch, the AAC key-
board was fastest even though the am-
biguous keyboard requires traversing
only nine keys instead of 26.
