Thursday, March 3, 2016

OSP Community Survey Responses

We got 55 responses to our survey! Some of the highlights:
The most exciting thing here is that a third of respondents have already exceeded their regular typing speed, and it took at least half of them less than six months! Those are some pretty great stats, I have to say. Selected comments from respondents:
Qwerty typing was hurting my hands and it was too slow. I Googled ways to increase my speed, found out about stenography and court reporting, then found out about the Open Steno project.
One day I decided that there had to be a better system for typing. I then wanted to learn how a steno machine works and that led me to you. Thank you, by the way, for your generosity and incredible guidance.
After investigating colemak I discovered that it would not boost my speed or to any great extent save my hands from RSI. I chose steno because of my loathing of QWERTY and colemak's inability to provide higher speeds or truly improved ergonomics.
I want to see if steno helps my dyslexia.
Video games led to mechanical keyboards led to typing led to steno.
Practice material in the form a la Duo Lingo (start with whole sentences from the start) would be great.
The Discourse chat system has been wonderful. I feel a lot more connected to the few brave souls trying to learn steno than before. :)
I wish plover would use a more rapid release schedule; having only a few small features in each new release rather than waiting years for a big one seems to work well for other FOSS projects who are adopting the strategy.
That last user will be very happy to learn that we're on the brink of a major new release, and that our release schedule will be far more rapid after that point. But more on that as it develops! Also stay tuned for exciting new Steno Arcade and Stenosaurus news, coming in the next few weeks! Thanks, everyone, for answering the survey! It was really cool to see all your responses. Read the complete summary of responses here.

2 comments:

faraway_song said...

I'm color blind for some colors. So I couldn't read it.

Mirabai Knight said...

Oh, dear. I'm very sorry about that! If you click through to the full responses, though, you can mouseover each pie wedge and it'll show text labels, so hopefully that will work. I wish I could have just embedded the interactive version in the blog post, but I did a bit of googling and it's apparently not particularly straightforward to do, so I just pasted in screenshots. Not very accessible. Many apologies!