Kotaku

Here's a heartwarming story: a man named Chad Ruble hacked a Kinect to allow his mom, a stroke victim, to send e-mail for the first time in 12 years. Watch and enjoy.

(via Make)

Looks a little limited in what you can "type" but I am sure it will only improve. Nice to see that she is able to send email again.

or instead of hacking a kinect, he could just place the pc on her lap and let her type.

Considering she is a stroke victim and can't type anymore I don't think that would do any good.  She probably can't even type on a keyboard like this

let along a small shitty laptop keyboard.

If either of you read the article, you would have read that she has aphasia. Her condition means while she knows what she wants to say, she no longer possesses the cognitive ability to express it by typing it or writing it.

Which is why the display currently is simple. The intention is to expand what she can say later, but this is a first step.

There was, somewhere, possibly on Reddit, the full article on this that went into greater detail.  The Make article that's sourced above isn't the full article.

@FrancisNobleman

She has an excuse, but you most certainly don't. Learn to read, or at least pay attention. I am assuming you just said that out of ignorance, and not out of malice. If it was the latter. I am not even going to go there. I would end up being banned, but I sure as hell wouldn't be the one to deserve it.

@topic

I would like to thank the original poster for posting that here. It was both inspiring and moving. Maybe we should start some kind of a petition to encourage Microsoft to make communications software for the handicapped. As we saw pictographs are viable, and with voice recognition software it could be even easier then what we saw.