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Keyboards for One Hand?
visibleman asks: "Having recently damaged my right hand to the point where it is unusable for a month and only for light tasks after that I was wondering whether anyone in the community knows of any devices which replace the keyboard but require the use of only one hand. I remember a long time ago seeing in magazines something that had a single button per finger and relied on the user learning key combinations to make up letters but I have not seen this for ages, does anyone know what I am talking about?" Ask Slashdot covered this topic, twice: in this article from 1999 and a followup from 2001. For those readers who find themselves in this same situation, what solutions have you found and what were your experiences, good or bad? Are there any new devices in this vein that deserve mention or are the older solutions still the best?
About One Hand Typing I found it interesting even for those who can use both hands (it would be useful for typing and using the mouse at the same time).
lets ask google, shall we?
first, we get this site, about typing on a normal keyboard with one hand.
then this one, which shows a few one hand keyboards
also theres this kind of academic looking paper about half-QWERTY.
I had written a small program that would let you use a regular QWERTY keyboard efficiently (it uses your existing QWERTY skills) with one hand, but as it was based entirely on someone else's work, when they asked me to, I took it down.
So instead, try the HalfKeyboard on which my work was based. Failing that, I hear good things about the one-handed DVORAK layouts.
I think several of the 'wearable computer' labs were using this. Twiddler
These have the advantage that you don't need to buy new hardware to try them out.
You should look into the BAT Personal keyboard. They have different models for right and left hands. Fairly easy to use, I was able to type about 40WPM in less than a week on a MEDUSA workstation. I still prefer my Model M at home...
Mod me down and I shall become more trollish than you can possibly imagine!
Dasher lets you soft of "steer a course" through what you want to say, which is pretty handy when you need to create a long stream of text. In the current incarnation, it seems to be lc alphas and the space, only, but to blow out the bulk of your text, and insert punctuation and formatting later, it could be very handy. With use, it learns the statistical distribution of letter order, so that the easiest things to write are things you write a lot... when you pass through a "J", vowels are big and easy to hit, while consonants are tiny little slits. You'll see what I mean when you play with it. I don't use it myself, aside from seeing what it can do so I can help others use it if needed, but it's definitely what I would use if I needed to write a book and had only limited use of my hands.
No need for a new keyboard - a remap is all you need. The single-handed Dvorak layouts are built into Windows, Linux, and probably OSX. Even though I have the use of both hands, I've considered learning left-handed Dvorak so I don't have to lift my right hand from the mouse.
From this website about one-handed keyboarding: In 1945, during World War II, Colonel Robert Allen lost his right arm. Being a writer, he now found typing nearly impossible. He contacted August Dvorak and asked for help. Using his previous research, August developed keyboard layouts for one handed typists. These are known as the Dvorak left hand layout and the Dvorak right hand layout. A few months after using the Dvorak left hand layout, the Colonel was typing over 50 WPM.