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Accessibility for People with Limited Mobility?

Posted by Cliff on from the hands-free-computing dept.

rscrawford asks: "There's an older woman at my church who suffers from advanced Parkinson's Disease. She's in good spirits but misses being able to communicate with her children who live far away. Because she she has advanced tremors and her muscles have atrophied, she can no longer use a keyboard; and because her voice quavers, she probably wouldn't be able to use voice recognition software. Now, I've seen tools for people who are vision impaired or who have cognitive impairments, but what about people like this woman? Are there any tools that would help her use her computer to e-mail her children?"

9 of 36 comments (clear)

  1. well by PunkOfLinux · · Score: 3, Informative

    I remember reading about a mouse software or driver or something that was specifically designed for people with unsteady hands. What it does is it takes the average of the cursor position and gives that to windows to work with.

    Another solution you might want to look into would be engineering something that could track the movement of part of her body and translate that into mouse movements.

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  2. Get her a BigKeys keyboard by QuantumG · · Score: 5, Informative

    They have keys that are 4 times as big as standard keyboard keys. Recommended for those suffering from Parkinson's. Also good for getting toddlers hooked on computers.

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    How we know is more important than what we know.
  3. Help her yourself by Max+von+H. · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The easiest and best way would most certainly be to go there yourself, keep her company for awhile, and type her e-mails! It'll be a lot nicer for her in all aspects, whithout having to devise complex stuff for her to use *alone*, which will be most likely difficult and tiring for her.

    Stop being a geek for a few hours and be a human friend. Parkinson's disease is extremely tiring, people affected by it at the stage you describe benefit a lot more from some human presence than any gadget, unless of course if such gagdget were to function seamlessly (wich it prolly won't).

    Cheers,

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    1. Re:Help her yourself by Tango42 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Having someone there would be good, I'm sure, but she might also want some independence. Being dependant on someone coming over to help with her email means she have to plan everything around when they can be there. It also means there's no privacy in her communication.

  4. Morse? by Vo0k · · Score: 4, Funny

    Try Morse code, and recognition + morse->text conversion software. With Parkinson's disease she could get a nice WPM rate, but it would be hard for her not to send long strings of "eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee" instead of pausing. ;)

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  5. Dasher by Apreche · · Score: 3, Insightful

    http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/dasher/

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  6. Low tech solution by Sicarius-128 · · Score: 3, Informative

    Search for a keyguard. It's a plate that goes over a normal keyboard that has holes in it. It allows the user to hook their finger in the right hole for a key and then apply pressure to press that key. Simple and effective.

  7. Guarded keyboard, virtual keyboard by yabHuj · · Score: 4, Informative
    Others already mentioned mouse drivers with jitter correction, eyetracker, oversized keyboards.

    Other things I have seen:

    • A standard (or oversized) keyboard with a guidance grid (key-/finger-sized holes) mounted a few mm above the keys. Hand and fingers can rest and tremble until the correct key(hole) is found and pressed. Inhibits accidentally pressing the wrong key and is comparatively cheap. Hazardous for finger joints for people with too forceful tremor or spastic jerks, though. See e.g. http://www.keytools.com/keyboards/guarded.asp (found trough google). Decreasing or disabling autotype/repeat will help here as will anti-repetition keyboard drivers.

    • Input systems where you select the key with buttons, laserpointer, shouts, etc. like http://www.keytools.com/keyboards/lucy_comms.asp (google again). A famous example is the text2sound machine Stephen Hawking is using. Not cheap if done in hardware.

    • Maybe just try as first "zero-investment" help: switch the mouse driver to low response and no (ZERO) acceleration. Then let her use a virtual keyboard with a size she can work with (small enough to be fast, big enough to be jitter-resistant), see e.g. http://www.freewarehome.com/System_Utilities/Tools _For_Disabled_p.html, http://www.lakefolks.org/cnt/ or even the builtin

    • Similar to above - but useful even if her tremors are too high for moused usage: Get a joystick/gamepad she can handle - or re-build one from a cheap gamepad (to be dissected - keep the electronics, dump the mechanics) and low-injury (light-/emergency) switches where she does not scratch herself on the edges. Set her PC to use the microsoft virtual keyboard click/select mode mode http://www.microsoft.com/enable/training/windowsxp /usingkeyboard.aspx

    • If her tremors are even to high for that, set the virtual keyboard to scanning mode and give her one single trigger (from the gamepad/joystick you built before). Select a trigger/switch she can control best (finger, hand, foot, head, shoulder, tongue, breathing, ...


    Good luck!
  8. Have you tried voice recognition or just assuming? by gothzilla · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Dragon voice recognition software might surprise you. When I worked at a school district I got a pc set up for a disabled student. He could barely speak and unless you'd spent a few months with him learning to listen you couldn't understand him. Dragon picked up on it just fine and after a few weeks of training it was working beautifully. This was a number of years ago so I imagine the software has only gotten better.