Why can’t people read?

It really, really irks me when professionals can’t even be bothered to look at what they’re describing. The Assistive Technology Lending Library at Temple describes the one-handed Maltron keyboard this way: “Besides the standard QWERTY layout, the Maltron has its own layout (with two letters on every key) created to minimize movement even further. Press a button at the top to switch between the two layouts.” The one-handed Maltron has no QWERTY — the layout is one-handed Malt, hence the name. Those are NUMBERS on the keys, genius — the little red button lets you use the letter keys as a numeric keypad. UPDATE: Their site has been corrected.

On assistive tech specialists and “help”

Why is it that people persist in being “helpful,” well after you’ve made it clear that you already found something that works for you?

I was thinking about the process of my internship in grad school. It was already making me nervous because I had never tried to use any of my equipment in public before, and it was taking a while for the Student Services office to figure out how to “lend” their copy of Dragon to the place I’d be interning for. But at least, I thought, I’d explained to my supervisor and Student Services that I’d be bringing my own keyboard with me, and my supervisor seemed to have no problem.

Ironically, it was Student Services who seemed not to have gotten the message. Part of the reason it took so long to establish my accommodations was that they kept calling me and the supervisor with recommendations that were absolutely not doable. The coordinator seemed quite insistent that I let her order a 508 keyboard from Temple’s lending library. A 508 keyboard is your basic flat two-handed membrane/rubber dome keyboard, except that it’s wired to toggle one-handed typing by holding the spacebar and mirroring the other half of the keyboard. When I told the coordinator that I would definitely be bringing my own, she replied, “And you can’t use the 508 why, exactly?” As if I were being unnecessarily obstinate. So, my nerves becoming increasingly shot, I told her.

1. Any flat keyboard causes my fingers to go into spasm. My hand doesn’t bend or stretch that way anymore. The force required to press a rubber dome would likely hasten the process.
2. Even if I didn’t get spasms, there’d be no way that I could touch type on the thing anytime soon. I haven’t so much as touched a QWERTY keyboard in years. My visual spatial skills are terrible, and trying to mentally flip the image of a keyboard I haven’t used for years would frustrate me to no end.
3. My thumb is not strong enough to be used as constantly as it would have needed to be.

Conversely, the Maltron layout is stored in my muscle memory, and it doesn’t give me spasms unless I’ve been typing for way too long, which doesn’t really happen. If I need to, I can reach over and press a thumb key with my index finger. Furthermore, it’s mine — no work required on the part of either my supervisor or Student Services. If Student Services wanted to be helpful, they could have borrowed a Maltron from Temple so I wouldn’t have had to carry mine back and forth.

Assistive technology is a personal decision, and your client won’t always fit the cookie-cutter. I don’t know whether the coordinator disregarded everything that was in my medical file, or whether they just needed someone to test the 508 keyboard, but the amount of worry generated was completely unnecessary, considering that THE ACCOMMODATIONS HAD ALREADY BEEN MADE — BY ME.

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.

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.

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.