Community
Dasher has been built, broken, fixed, translated, tested and championed by hundreds of people across more than a quarter of a century. This page is our attempt to thank as many of them as we can. If we’ve missed you, please tell us — omissions are never intentional.
Creator & original project lead
Professor of Physics at the University of Cambridge. David created the first Dasher prototype in 1997 and led the Inference Group that turned it into a research project and then free software. Dasher still stands on the information theory he brought to it.
Dasher began in 1997 in the Inference Group at the University of Cambridge. These people took it from a prototype to a widely-used, multi-platform, open source project.
Lead developer (1998–2002)
Developed the research version of Dasher for his PhD; created the Eye-Dasher and Pocket PC versions.
Research advisor
Lecturer in the Cambridge Computer Laboratory; helped design the original experiments.
Open source release (2002)
Prepared Dasher for its first open source release.
Developer & project manager
Created Dasher v3 for GNU/Linux; project manager from 2006. A driving force for many years.
Mobile developer
Worked on v3 for the iPAQ running Linux.
Project manager (2002–2003)
Supported by the Gatsby Foundation.
Project manager (2003–2005)
Maintainer and developer during the v4 era.
Speech-Dasher developer (2003–2007)
Developed the Speech-Dasher prototype.
Developer (2005–2006)
Two-dimensional Dasher, gaze/head/gesture tracking.
Dasher v5
Developed the v5 update and the modern macOS compatibility work.
The architect of the v6 split
Sebastian carried out the large refactoring effort that broke the old monolithic Dasher apart into a shared DasherCore engine and its separate native frontends. That split is the foundation of modern v6 — every Apple, Windows and GTK build today stands on the work he did.
The current rewrite is carried by an active core of contributors across the shared DasherCore engine and its native frontends.
People and organisations who championed Dasher, opened doors, and supported its users — not all of whom show up in a git log. Far more have given their time, expertise and guidance over the years than we could ever list here; if we’ve missed you, it is not for lack of gratitude.
Dasher exists for the people who rely on it. We’re especially grateful to the users and advocates who’ve shown the world what eyes-free, switch and gaze-driven communication makes possible — and who push us to make it better. Naming just a few of the many:
Dasher would not exist without sustained financial and institutional support.
Original research funding at the Cambridge Inference Group.
Open accessibility: groundwork, infrastructure, standards.
Supported the v6 rewrite.
Dasher's birthplace.
The names below were extracted automatically from the commit history of the Dasher
repositories — the main dasher archive going back to 1997, plus
dasher-web, the Apple, Windows, GTK and Mobile frontends,
DasherCore, and this website. It includes developers, translators and packagers
across every era of the project. 273 people, and counting.
Generated 2026-06-18. Names are deduplicated from git history; some encoding variants or duplicate identities may remain. If your name is missing or mis-spelled, please let us know.