Need of Predictive Text for this Forum

[Ellie]

Graham, I use a Tobii gaming eye tracker, which is very responsive, and found excellent mouse open source software on GitHub. I found the assistive tech offerings too slow and didn't give me access to all areas of my PC.

I often free type faster with the open source keyboard, which has customisable speed settings etc, and can move. It might be OK to write code with, IDK.

Maybe it's not for now, but it's something to bear in mind for the future.

Love Ellie.

[Graham]

Thanks for the excellent advice Ellie. Definitely something to do later on. Yes, you're right, the standard offerings work to an extent but not well, hence my frustration with the forum.

Your prolific typing on this forum suggests that the investment is well worth it.

Love Graham

[matthew55]

My problem is not keyboards but my fingers. I don't think anyone can help me with that.😄

[Barry52]

My Samsung phone has been playing up and in the interest of compatibility I decided to get an iPhone as my other devices are Apple. When setting it up I somehow managed to magnify the screen. Despite watching numerous YouTube videos on how to get back to normal I couldn’t do it because it requires a 3 finger successive tap and my fingers are reluctant to work which is why I type with 1 finger and rely on predictive text. My friendly postman who checks in on me every day managed to sort it for me and I will resist fiddling with the settings from now on.

[Ellie]

My problem is not keyboards but my fingers. I don't think anyone can help me with that.

No, nobody can fix your fingers but thankfully that doesn't mean you can't type or use a PC. Don't despair Sweetie 🤗🤗

[Graham]

Please can the MNDA reply to this request for predictive text. It's very time consuming posting on your website and it is an opportunity to do real development that will be of great value to people with MND.

[Admin_MND]

Please can the MNDA reply to this request for predictive text. It's very time consuming posting on your website and it is an opportunity to do real development that will be of great value to people with MND.

Hi Graham,

We are sorry to hear that using the forum is proving time consuming, obviously we aim to try and make it easy as we can.

From our experience, predictive text is not a common feature of forums and of course we didn't have it on the old version of this forum either. As others have already mentioned, predictive text is usually a functionality found within the device you're using, rather than on an actual website/forum.

However, we have raised the question with vBulletin who provide the software for this forum and will let you know once we've had a response.

Thanks,

Forum Admin.

[Graham]

Hi Forum Admin,

Thank you for the reply.

It is becoming a major problem for me in recent years and I have noticed that other users really struggle to use the forum, so much so that they never post again. Actually this forum could be "the place to go" for all our writing if we get it right. This is the place to test.

Communication is a crucial part of our lives and it would be extremely helpful to have a really well thought out predictive text system.

I have over 40 years of software/IT experience and could help guide the guys at vBulletin.

[Admin_MND]

Hi Graham,

We've heard back from vBulletin today and their official response is:

"There is no functionality for this other than what is built into any device that a user may be using and there is no add-on available for the forum that does this I'm afraid."

So unfortunately at this time there's not much further we can go on this, and I believe it would be the same situation if we were using any other forum software too. It just seems to be standard to rely on third-party providers for predictive text functionality.

We will keep it on our list of future forum enhancements though, and if the opportunity becomes available in the future, we'll look at implementing it.

Thanks,

Forum Admin.

[Graham]

Dear Admin,

There really ought to be a plug-in for this forum to facilitate predictive text. You have had a year to look into this. It is time to put this vbulletin site to one side now and get a modern forum.