Equal opportunity one-handed typing software

If a Maltron or BAT one-handed keyboard isn’t available to you (particularly in a school, as funding cuts are increasing at least where I am), here at least is a nice balanced one-handed typing tutor. It has options for both QWERTY and Dvorak, for left and right hand. Now teachers have NO EXCUSE for not exposing a one-handed student to at least Dvorak. However, I do strongly urge you to get the smallest keyboard you can find, with decent key action if possible. “Mini” is usually smaller than “compact.” There are also transparent Dvorak stickers that allow you to have both layouts on the keys at the same time (so, again, no excuse). The tutor download is here: http://www.typingstar.com/

Maltron keyboard research and trivia

A recent comment on one of my posts reminded me to dig through my bookmarks — a while ago I’d stored some interesting tidbits about the Maltron keyboards but forgot to post them. So, some links.

“QWERTYUIOP? Lillian Malt Has Discovered A Better Way” — This is a People Magazine article from 1977, describing the two-handed Maltron keyboard and its use with electric typewriters. The wording clearly shows the article’s age (cringe), but it’s interesting all the same.

Maltron research papers — On this page are research papers written by Stephen Hobday and Lillian Malt, all of which deal with the two-handed keyboard. I would love to see the papers for the one-handed or mouth stick keyboard.

World record for one-handed keyboarding — At the bottom of this page is a mention of Diana L. Erickson, who set a world record in one-handed typing on a Maltron one-handed keyboard: 85 words per minute. Stan Allen has posted a more complete article in his comment on the one-handed keyboard review.

“Rewriting Rules to Make Keys a Work of Art” — This article briefly mentions the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s acquisition of a one-handed Maltron keyboard for its Department of European Art and Sculpture. The writer doesn’t seem to think much of it, and he’s right, compared to the health benefits versus the aesthetic — but I have things to say in a later post about that, because he’s not totally right.

Maltron keyboard on Wikipedia — The Wikipedia article intrigues me because of the dates — from that article, it sounds like the one-handed keyboard might have been invented first. Unfortunately, I don’t have the book cited as the source for that particular claim. I’ll have to look in the library; it sounds interesting. Perhaps the one-handed keyboard got glossed over as a mere “springboard” into the more common two-handed keyboard. Argh. Hate when people do that — as if being used by a smaller number of people makes it any less of a brilliant invention.

Old school: Typewriter Guy

My keyboard reminds me very vaguely of a typewriter, at least when it’s in its case. I know they’re totally different except for their portability, but even so, that thought led me to look up an old friend — Typewriter Guy, formerly of Sesame Street. I’m glad I did. He’s still cute — his voice resembles Bill Cosby, he narrows his eyes like Mo Willems’ pigeon, and (odd for his species) has only 4 fingers on each hand.

I could never actually type on the electric typewriter we kept in the kitchen; I dictated little stories to my sister when I was 6. (My first brush with proofreading, a harbinger of my present equipment: she’d typed “no” for “know” and I cried.) So, I was fascinated by the little red typewriter who wheeled around singing “nuni-nuni-nu” and getting in and out of trouble with the letter or word of the day by typing on himself. The result of his hunting and pecking startled him: the punchline of being knocked out by yellow yoyos or engulfed by green umbrellas. I like to think I started to understand words then. To this day I cannot fully understand the spoken word unless I see it. Somehow that made it easier to adjust to using Dragon years later, once I got over the initial shock and the longer disorientation period (which I will never quite get over). I knew the shapes my mouth would make, and so could mentally “type” them before I said them. (Even so, I feel relieved every time I see that my words have survived their leap to the screen.)

Typewriter Guy has a cousin in my keyboard, besides: the letter H is designated by a hand that looks as though it could span all his keys, no problem. (I should add that TG himself was quite the one-handed typist — the other mitt was busy making magic tricks or poking a pencil in his tire.) If you want to see Typewriter Guy’s adventures with shrinking cats, giant ears and making words come alive, a YouTube fan has collected many of the cartoon shorts here. Nuni-nuni-nu…

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.

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.

keyboards with one-handed Dvorak keys

If you want to make learning one-handed Dvorak a bit easier on yourself or just a board for your home computer, one-handed Dvorak layout keyboards are sold here. Unfortunately, they don’t look compact and I don’t know what the switches are. Probably membrane. Ow.

Review: The grail of one handed keyboards: Maltron

In the ergonomic keyboard market, one handed people are totally ignored, despite the fact that we have an even greater chance of developing RSI. After being diagnosed with numerous cumulative injuries in my good hand, which were most likely exacerbated by having to type on a standard QWERTY keyboard with it, I relied exclusively on Dragon NaturallySpeaking to access my computer. It’s a beautiful program, and I still use it for intense computer sessions be they Web browsing or 20 page papers. However, there are times and places when using your voice is not possible, or certain applications at work are not voice accessible. So what do you do, with every “split” or “natural” keyboard completely useless to you?

If you can, you save up your money until you can buy a Maltron single-handed keyboard — literally the only ergonomic full keyboard in the world for a one handed person. It was designed in 1977 by Stephen Hobday of Great Britain, and its layout was researched and invented by Lillian Malt, an expert on reading patterns. I can best describe it as the two-handed person’s contoured ergonomic keyboard, cut in half. The layout is obviously different from the two-handed Maltron; the frequency of keys for one hand will be different than for two.

The five home keys are Space ATEH on the right hand, from thumb to pinky finger. The home row in full is Space UISATEHN. Compare this with one hand on a QWERTY keyboard: FGHJ. See how far you have to stretch to get the other letters? Not so good. I fell in love with the frequency of use layout rather quickly; it’s even better than right-handed Dvorak. I confess, though — not being a “texter” — using my thumb for U and I took some getting used to, and to avoid stress I sometimes move over and use my index finger instead. If you have a larger hand span, this might not be a problem for you.

But the layout is only half of it; if it were just that, it would be just another Dvorak. The design is the other half. Not only are the keys compacted, but they are arranged in columns around the curved shape — not staggered — and the columns are recessed according to finger length, reducing the stretching required. The keyboard has a very slight slope to it, so you can rest your hand naturally on the keys without having to turn your arm to make your fingers meet them. Best of all, the keys are Cherry MX switches, which are incredibly gentle to type on — you barely have to press the key half way to generate a character. This doesn’t mean the keys are mushy or hypersensitive; you do have to make a purposeful movement, just a very slight one. After pounding on membrane/rubber dome keyboards, it’s seriously like laying your fingers on pillows.

They’ve pretty much thought of everything. Turn off Sticky Keys in your accessibility options; Maltron built it into the keyboard. The right-hand Shift, located in the thumb group, “latches,” releasing after the next key is pressed. The left-hand Shift is in the top right corner of the numeric keypad, and it locks — you have to press it again to deactivate it. I find the left-hand shift useful for selecting text, or typing in caps with punctuation. It is also useful if you use the tab key to navigate links and miss your mark; press left-hand Shift and tab backwards to your heart’s content. The left-hand control and left-hand Alt lock also, which is useful for executing a series of keyboard shortcuts or — a pleasant surprise — entering the codes for special characters. A red button by the function keys puts you in “numbers mode,” which means you can use the letter keys to enter numbers if you wish instead of the numeric keypad or the regular number keys above the letters. (Note: if you use Mouse Keys, you’ll need to deactivate that for it to work.)

In all, I’m thrilled that I found this keyboard, and impressed that Malt and Hobday troubled themselves to research one-handed data entry as well as two-handed, providing a lifesaver in what other companies would consider just a “niche market” and not worth their time or investment. This keyboard has returned a very important aspect of language to me: muscle memory. Sometimes when I think of words, I think of them in the way my fingers move to type them, and that pattern becomes the word. A mnemonic device, I guess. I can “feel” words again, and that’s worth everything.