3/10/2021
After meeting with my professors, we have come to the conclusion that I will be allowed to use one button on the keyboard to accomplish clicking tasks. There are a couple of reasons for this. Firstly, it would be very difficult to incorporate clicking functionality using only the technology that is at my disposal. The first idea was to use blinking which would be ineffective as when a person blinks, their gaze moves downward (or at least that is how their eyes are tracked at least). This would make it very difficult to click accurately. Another idea to click would be to use winks. Unfortunately, not everybody is able to wink and, even if we did try to implement that, the API that I am using does not allow me to track individual eyes, only the collective gaze. The second reason that we decided to allow me to use a single button would be that there are many interfaces that allow users with motor disabilities to still press at least one button.
After we decided to allow that, I got to work on how to actually implement that into my project. I eventually figured out a way to watch for user input of a specific key on the keyboard and to click where the current position of the mouse is. There was a lot of debugging to do. However, I am now able to set a keyboard hotkey to use as a left mouse click instead of using the actual left mouse button.
