One-handed typing lessons

If you want to see what learning a one-handed keyboard looks like, here are links to tutorials that I know of. I haven’t used the BAT keyboard.

http://www.maltron.com/training/index.htm Tutorials for the Maltron left and right handed ergonomic keyboards.

http://www.brandonfla.com/typingtutor/download.htm Tutorials for the left and right handed Dvorak layout. Dated, but should work.

http://www.infogrip.com/bat_kybd_details.asp#documentation Tutorials for the left and right handed BAT chorded keyboard.

RSI? One handed? Avoid Lilly Walters’ writing

I have an ironic sense of humor, but I’m finding it harder to laugh about this article placement. At first I was bemused, but now I’m just irritated. What in the hell is an article by Lilly Walters doing on RSI awareness websites? As someone whose musculoskeletal problems have been further complicated by RSI in my good hand, I don’t find it funny. Do these people not read the submissions before they post them? Walters is entitled to her opinions, certainly, but from an informational standpoint, her opinions are nothing but counterproductive when applied to RSI and its risk factors, especially for a one handed person. Walters may have a right hand and two of her left fingers, but she has no clue. I want to outline some points. Please bear with me to the end of this post.

Walters begins her article by saying, “Those of us in rehabilitation therapy help children and adults with disabilities enhance their lives, increase their independence and productivity.”

First of all — WALTERS IS NOT AN OCCUPATIONAL THERAPIST, OR ANY MEDICAL PROFESSIONAL WHATSOEVER. SHE IS A FACE PAINTER. Just look on any of her home pages. In addition, her first sentence is plagiarized from the mission statement of rehabtool.com.  Misrepresenting yourself just to sell a $50 typing manual is just a little bit unethical. So is shilling your self published books on Amazon. (So, arguably, is buying nearly every single web domain related to one handed typing. “Fanatical” is more of a word for that though, I think.)

Second, how could anyone even buy her false credential? If you were a true member of the helping professions and had ever seen someone struggling with injury, you would NOT say the following: “In our world of terrific technologies, we happily embrace the new alternatives. But there is something glaringly wrong in that circle of embrace for the one hand typist.” You would also not say this: “If one hand has good usage, then, although harder on the hands, the standard one hand QWERTY is perhaps the best choice.”  What occupational therapist would encourage you to do something that they know presents high risk?  (And who would be so melodramatic about it?)

Also, while therapists do begin by suggesting the least complicated solution and working up from there if more accommodation is needed, I don’t think any therapist would ever outright condemn assistive technology as “glaringly wrong.” They understand the importance of prevention now. They would be more likely to promote caution and steadiness — I doubt they would egg you on by demanding that you be “the fastest, most competent person.” While competency is certainly necessary, the competitiveness implied by the emphasis on speed is certainly not. ACCURACY AND COMFORT ARE MORE IMPORTANT THAN SPEED. Walters may type 40 to 80 words per minute, but her manual borders on illiterate, as does her website. Typos don’t help your credibility, and it helps to know the difference between “dominant” and “dominate.” She spells Dvorak as “Dvoark” all over the place, which makes me think of aardvarks. If you’re going to badmouth something you haven’t tried, have the courtesy to spell it right.

Walters blows her cover here, and her reasoning is specious to boot. Her evangelism for QWERTY and condemnation of anything else seems rooted in several things. Foremost, she needs to push her typing manual, of course. I can only assume that’s why she lies that Dvorak cannot be found in the workplace.  Hello — get administrative rights and activate the Dvorak layout in your OS.  One-handed keyboards are portable; you will find them in the workplace if you bring them with you. Then, judging by the number of times the word “normal” is written “NORMAL” in both her manual and her many websites, as well as her declaration of “smug pride” that she doesn’t need any adaptive equipment, she’s very insecure about herself. She’s afraid of being different. That’s why she’s willing to tell you to risk your hand — she’s projecting her fear of looking different on to you by saying, “Selecting an alternative keyboard makes the user feel apart from their peer group.”

Don’t put words in my mouth — I’ll do whatever I have to to keep my remaining hand function, and I’m indebted to the Maltron and other technology for helping me do that. I was able to work with my peers in a library because I had the equipment to do so. If I didn’t have my keyboard or Dragon NaturallySpeaking, I wouldn’t have been able to do my internship. In fact, I received many compliments on my keyboard. My assistive technology enables me to be included — it doesn’t isolate me in the slightest, thanks very much.

This article does not belong on RSI websites that under any other circumstances would be advocating ergonomic keyboards like Maltron or layouts such as Dvorak, as well as speech recognition. I think the picture of Walters’ typing manual says it all: a hovering one armed Superman in a business suit and slick cheesy smile, supporting his entire weight on his fingertips, which are apparently resting on a flat QWERTY keyboard. If that posture isn’t asking for RSI, I don’t know what is.

Another free/cheap word processor for Dragon

When I first reviewed the Jarte word processor, it must just have been a momentary glitch when I tried to use it with Dragon. Now, it works fine with Dragon. (Granted, I am trying this out on Jarte Plus, and before I was trying it on the free version. I don’t know if that had anything to do with anything.) You can select, capitalize, correct, and insert before and after words. You can also select lines and paragraphs. You cannot select individual sentences with the standard command, but there’s a way to get around that: simply tell Dragon to select the first through the last word of the sentence. For example, to correct or delete one of my previous sentences I would say, “select ‘you’ through ‘paragraphs period’.”

Another nice thing about Jarte is that, while you still can’t use natural language commands for everything, you can at least access the main toolbar menus like “File, Edit, Format” and so forth. (NOTE: YOU NEED TO CHECK “MINIMAL” UNDER THE “VIEW” MENU.)  However, once you do that, you will have to speak the underlined letter of the option you want, e.g. “press P” for Paragraph under the Format menu.  For text formatting, the rules for Writer still apply to Jarte: say the keyboard shortcut before and after the text you want to bold or italicize or whatever. Or, select your text and then say the keyboard shortcut. Note: if you want to copy a bunch of text, do NOT say “Copy” after you have selected it. Say “press control C”. The right clicking shortcut applies too: right-click on whitespace in the document, or within the text you have already entered, and you will get a context menu containing mostly clipboard commands such as copy and paste. Jarte seems to be a little bit quicker in response to dictation than is Writer, and with Jarte, you aren’t locked out of editing if you accidentally left click. If you want a free or cheap word processor that will work with Dragon provided you know keyboard shortcuts, and will give you line spacing and other options that Dragon Pad can’t, Jarte might actually be a better bet than Writer. It seems more reliable to me. Meanwhile, I’m going to go in and edit my previous review of Jarte.

Careful with Half-QWERTY…

This is why, if I had had a choice years ago, I would not only have refused QWERTY but Half-QWERTY (or the 508 keyboard, as I am right handed) as well. A cautionary note from a therapist, found here:

“As with 10-finger typing, Half-QWERTY presents a risk for developing repetitive strain injury (RSI). Due to the continuous use of just one hand and the awkward hand positions required to make many key combinations, it is suggested that the risk is even greater with this one-handed method. Therefore, this would not be a safe method for someone who has a history of RSI and/or someone who has a lot of typing to do at one time. If a fast typing rate is important to your client there may be other access methods that will allow for faster typing speeds, for example voice recognition.” — Jacqueline Chin, B.Sc.H, O.T.(C)

I’d be more concerned with my health, I think… if you’re going to shrink a keyboard, do it some way that makes ergonomic sense…QWERTY makes even less sense for a one handed person when it’s folded in half! Any keyboard is going to be more work one-handed, but don’t make it harder than it has to be! There are better choices.

Portable Apps: Portable word completion

Unfortunately, public computers are not great (yet) at being accessible to those with physical disabilities. Most often, the barrier is money. Open source software may eventually change some of that, but for now a lot of network folks still need to be convinced that these programs are even worth installing.Until then, you have at least one option — how well it works will depend on your other hardware or software needs and whether you can bring them with you also. If you’re in a public place like a library that only gives you a set amount of time on a machine, and you need word completion or shorthand in order to work efficiently, I suggest downloading the portable version of Open Office from Portable Apps. Portable Apps will install programs like Open Office onto any flash drive you have, provided you have enough space — your flash drive doesn’t have to be U3. The catch is that once Open Office is on the flash drive, you will have to program your shorthand into the AutoCorrect replacement table again, the instructions for which are here. Once you have done that, however, you can load your flash drive into any public computer, run the program, and type with both abbreviation expansion and word completion enabled.

If for some reason you cannot use a flash drive, there is another more roundabout solution. If the public computer is running Microsoft Word, you will be out of luck if you want word completion, but your shorthand might still be of some good to you. When you are typing, simply use your shorthand as you normally would. It will not expand — it will be entered as it is. Before your time on the computer is up, save the document (in 97/XP/2003 format) and e-mail it to yourself. When you get home, open the attachment in Writer. Then, go to the Format menu and look under AutoFormat. If “while typing” is checked, uncheck it. Then, go under AutoFormat again and click Apply. Your shorthand should expand. If it doesn’t, you might have to go under Tools — AutoCorrect Options– Options and make sure the box for “use replacement table” is checked for M (modifying existing text). Also note that you will only run the replacement once. After you’re done, you can go back to AutoFormat and check “while typing” again, and go into the AutoCorrect replacement table and check T (while typing).

Portable Apps has Firefox also, so you can have Mouseless Browsing or whatever add-ons already set up. It also offers an onscreen keyboard. Unfortunately, it’s only the Windows “lite” version, which most public PCs have already. I wish they’d make a portable Click-N-Type.

The Integrated Keyboard, or Mousing with Maltron

The other day David Hostyk posted a very helpful comment on my “About” page concerning a program called Integrated Keyboarding. Presumably, it lets you use the letter keys to move and click the mouse cursor, a sort of more convenient Mouse Keys — a clever idea.

However, it doesn’t look feasible for the Malt layout because the motion commands are bound to certain letters, which of course are for a QWERTY keyboard. (I’m guessing it would be problematic in Dvorak also, but I don’t know.) But there is good news if you use a Maltron — you can already use the letter keys to control the mouse cursor if you want to. Simply enable Mouse Keys (left Alt, left Shift, NumLock), then press the red button under the function keys. Normally this would put you in numbers mode — making the letter keys replicate the numeric keypad — but since you’ve set the numeric keypad to replicate the mouse, your letter keys will likewise move the mouse. The directions correspond to the numeric keypad, so that you would find the direction on the letter keys looking at the number underneath. Like so:

F — left (4)
O — right (6)
M — up (8 )
T — down (2)
G — upper left diagonally (7)
P — upper right diagonally (9)
A — lower left diagonally (1)
E — lower right diagonally (3)
D — left click (5)
H — double-click (+)
- then D — right-click (- then 5)

If you want to drag or drop, reach over to the numeric keypad and press Insert or Delete, then move the cursor either by the keypad or the letter bank.

As far as Integrated Keyboarding, it still has potential. I’m wondering if it would work with an on-screen keyboard. I say that because if it did, it may enable a user to use the on-screen keyboard to control the mouse by switch scanning. There aren’t that many programs out there that let you do that — the only one I know of is from Gus Software, and it’s hideously expensive. So, if this program happens to work, you could conceivably create a Click-N-Type on-screen keyboard containing just those keys and thereby move your mouse with your switch. Pretty cool.

Dragons vs. Pirates

The Internet is occasionally an excellent resource for secondhand assistive technology. In the past year I have seen a bunch of SmartNAV 3 EGs and a few Maltron keyboards — one mouthstick and two right handed models — on eBay. If the hardware is stated to be in good condition and you can verify it from the pictures, by all means snipe away. Anything to avoid paying through the nose. (Depending on your plan and circumstances, it’s possible that insurance will not cover spit, besides the fact that many professionals have not heard of half the stuff.) I’ve found several of my things this way, and they work just fine. Hardware, in summary, is usually a pretty safe item to buy used via eBay — though very scarce.

However, the one abundant assistive technology item on eBay is the one I’m going to tell you NOT TO BUY: any auction for Dragon NaturallySpeaking, 9.5 Preferred in particular. Almost all of these are “disk only” auctions, sold in quantities too large to be believable. You can bet that they’re pirated. The pirated software is a truly bad thing to buy, not only for legal reasons but also functional reasons. One disk means one serial number, a unique way of identifying that particular installation disk. No two disks should share a serial number. Because the eBay software is a copy, however, it is “borrowing” an activation/serial number from a legit disk. That serial number has probably been assigned to five or more copies.

For obvious reasons, this is not good. It doesn’t matter what copy that serial number is on, it just matters that it’s being entered into different computers, and more than once. Nuance has a limit on how many times you can activate their software. They figure this out by making a note of how many times that number has been entered, regardless of which disk it was entered from. They see one serial number and think one disk: yours. If you exceed that limit, the software will either not install or disable itself. Even if you just get the disk, and only install it once on your own machine, somebody else who bought a pirated copy from eBay might have already entered it into theirs, and so on and so forth, because their copy had the same serial number. If you physically depend on speech recognition, for Pete’s sake go to Circuit City or Best Buy. They actually do sell it.

You can tell counterfeits by the following:
no retail box (or a “non-retail box”)
no paper manual
no headset, or a generic headset

PLEASE NOTE: if somebody claims to be the “copywrite owner with serial numbers” [sic], that is a bunch of bull. NUANCE is the copyright holder, not the eBay seller; Nuance owns the invention. And having serial numbers, as I’ve just explained, doesn’t necessarily mean a thing. Of course the pirate has serial numbers — stolen ones! So, for your peace of mind — “Arrr, matey! Hie yerself to yer nearest computer store, and hang these scalliwags!”

Making Dragon 9.5 work with Firefox

I am very fond of Mozilla Firefox lately; I have version 2. It’s absolutely a more keyboard friendly browser, what with Mouseless Browsing133 and Bookmark Keys. It also works fine with a SmartNAV pointer and a dwell clicker or on-screen keyboard. But I have really been needing to give myself a rest, and was sick of going back and forth between IE 6 — Dragon’s favorite — and Firefox depending on what my level of mobility was. So I called up Firefox with Dragon and found that Firefox has become my universal browser.

However, Firefox is not totally voice accessible out-of-the-box. You must have Mouseless Browsing installed. If you don’t, you will have to say the entire name of a link in one breath to access it. With Mouseless Browsing, all you have to do is find the number next to the link and say “numeral [whatever].” Also, though Dragon supports basic Firefox commands such as “go to address,” “go there,” “go back/forward,” “refresh,” etc., there is no “text field” command like there is in IE. Thus, getting into search boxes can be a bit of a problem. Again, this is where Mouseless Browsing comes in. Text fields count as form elements. Under the Tools — Add-ons menu, go to the options for Mouseless Browsing and make sure the box “enable IDs for form elements” is checked.(You may also want to check the box that says “execute automatically without pressing enter.”) Once you do that, you can get into a text field simply by saying the number next to the field. Perfect.

Making Dragon 9.5 work with Open Office

Just because Dragon doesn’t advertise support for something doesn’t mean you can’t make it work to some extent. One of these things is Open Office, specifically Writer. Granted, there are caveats — it’s not going to work as seamlessly with Dragon as Microsoft Word, simply because it wasn’t made to. But, despite this oversight, it will absolutely work for you in a pinch with the right workarounds.

Summary: dictation is excellent. “Select that [or word],” “correct that,” “cap that,” and “scratch that” all work, as do “insert before/after.” So do “new line” and “new paragraph.” You can also say “select the paragraph,”as long as your cursor is at the beginning of the paragraph, and “select line.” “Select all” works too.

Some caveats: Do not under any circumstances perform a vocal or manual left mouse click anywhere in your document, because then you are locked out of going back and correcting anything by voice from then on, even if you close and reopen the document. I don’t know why that is. Occasionally, if you open a saved document and start dictating with the insertion point at the end of a word, you have to say the space yourself. Next importantly, if you want to bold or italicize something, you cannot use the natural language commands. Instead, to italicize something you would say “press control I,” your text, and then “press control I” again to turn off the italics. Alternately, you could say the text first, then tell Dragon to select it, and then say “press control I.” For bold and underlined text, you would do the same with B and U.

Actually, you need to know keyboard navigation commands throughout Open Office because you can’t access the menus by natural language either. To save your document, don’t say “save,” but rather “press control S.” I’m familiar with keyboard shortcuts so this doesn’t bother me, but it requires some memorization if you’re not. There is a very helpful shortcut, though. While you cannot left click in the document, you can absolutely right click. Performing a right-click brings up the context menu. This menu includes the basic formatting options, such as font and font size, bullets, and line spacing. So, if you wanted to double space your document, you would say “mouse right-click,” then “press I” because that letter is underlined in the option for “line spacing.” Then you would say “press D” for double.

Writer also has its own shortcuts built in, which you can see by pressing Alt T, then C, then tabbing over to Keyboard. Saying any of those will perform the corresponding function, and some are blank so you can use them for what you want. What Dragon can’t do by natural language, you can make it do by saying the keys. If something happens to Word and DragonPad doesn’t have enough formatting capabilities, Writer works well enough, with caution.

Be a N00b at your own risk!

Well, excuse the heck out of me.  A professional programmer might well find it ridiculous that somebody wanted to learn about it with no intention of pursuing it full time. But it’s just as useful, I think, if I wanted to learn it for my own ends. So, with that in mind, I inquired whether it was possible to use VBA to help with the problem of Word’s replacement table not distinguishing between upper and lowercase entries. It’s a small thing, but would make it easier to use Speedwords for when I couldn’t think of efficient contractions. It’s easier to undertake learning to do something if you know there’s a use at the end. Now, apparently that was a rank amateur question. I knew that but still didn’t know the answer, so I asked. I was helpfully told that wasn’t possible, then not so helpfully told:

“Why not learn how to type!!!”

Uh, excuse me, Mr. Programmer. I asked a question because I didn’t know the answer. Answering a question does not require making assumptions about the questioner. If I asked, I had a reason. Enough said. Ever consider somebody with a disability who couldn’t type much might want to learn how to adapt her machine, eg by using shorthand, without paying through the nose for specialized software she can’t afford? I know you didn’t know that. But if you don’t know why somebody is asking, don’t presume. I’m sorry I’m new at programming, but is there anywhere a student can ask computer or programming questions and get a bare bones answer?

I’ve seen it with the adapted keyboard and speech recognition, too — people think they’re unnecessary or “laziness” or something like that just because they haven’t touched them or don’t personally have a need for them. I remember a reviewer of Dragon saying it was useless and slow because she could already type 150 WPM. If you can do that, what the hell more do you want? Warp speed? The mentality boggles me.