keyboardr is a meta-search engine that I believe has potential to make web searching easier for many individuals who face special access challenges.

keyboardr incorporates a form of word prediction; and it can be used entirely from the keyboard, without requiring a mouse. As you start typing into the search box, the search engine immediately begins coming up with results for the most likely terms you are looking for.  For example, I wanted to search for text to speech.  By the time I had typed in “text to”, keyboardr had come up with what I wanted.

Just as the search process is facilitated by the word prediction feature, accessing  search results is  facilitated in keyboardr because you can easily move between results with the arrow keys on the keyboard.  When you want to check out a result, you can choose it by hitting the Enter key.  Pressing the escape key puts your cursor right back in the search box so you can start over or move in another direction with your search.

As a meta-search engine, keyboardr looks in four specific places–Google “Web”, Google Images, Wikipedia, and Youtube.  Results are displayed predictably in the same place on the page for every search.  These are the same four places where I often begin looking for information.

I’ve embedded a video below in which Julius Eckert, the developer of keyboardr, show how it all works and outlines future plans for his site.  He would like users to consider making keyboardr.com their home page on the web.

keyboardr.com from Julius Eckert on Vimeo.