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Confessions of a Left-Handed Technology User
harrymcc writes "Over at TIME.com, I wrote about my trials and tribulations as a left-handed person who uses technology products. An awful lot of them have clearly been designed with the right-handed majority in mind, even when they claimed they weren't. But the good news is that modern smartphones and tablets are very lefty-friendly compared to the devices that preceded them."
The Microsoft logo used for this story is outdated.
As a life long lefty, I can honestly say I've never felt the need to complain because a piece of technology isn't designed for me. I don't find any technology gadget I own to be designed in such a way so as to impede my usage of it.
I do know lefties who complain constantly about the injustice afforded them, but to be honest I've never been able to empathize with them.
You should really lock your PC when you walk away. Someone just trolled you and made you look like a complete jackass.
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I'm left-handed and I seriously don't see all of the life-challenges that are moaned about in this article and others, whether they concern technology or not. I'm pretty convinced that life as a left-hander is no harder than it would be if I were right-handed.
I'm left handed, but I've never had an issue using mice or trackpads right handed. After a little test right now it seems I also use my right hand more often when using a tablet or smartphone - probably because of the mouse thing.
Random facts that perhaps nobody cares about: I play baseball, golf and hockey with a right handed orientation, but racket games like tennis and badminton left handed. I am more comfortable brushing my teeth and shaving with my left hand, but have recently been occasionally practice with my right just for fun. When I was a kid, I broke my left wrist and so was forced to learn to write, eat etc, with my right hand for a while. It's fun to practice being ambidextrous.
which is totally what she said
Other than smudging the ink from those awful erasable pens, I never payed much attention to products working or not working for us lefties, until CD's came along. Actually, it wasn't until I watched my right handed friend struggle to open a CD case. Somehow he was awkwardly trying to pry the front open with his right hand, which between the case swinging open against the natural movement of the right arm, and somehow gripping the edges of the lid with his left hand as he held the back, was quite entertaining.
For me it was natural to hold the back with my right hand (hinge side on my middle fingers, other side on my thumb) and then grab the front with my left hand (fingers/thumb along top and bottom). The case just opened beautifully.
It is the only tech device I can think of that worked better for us lefties from day one.
I'm in my right mind and I have the answer to everything!
As a lefty, I always thought it was a good thing that the mouse is on the right. Mousing isn't something that requires incredible accuracy, and the accuracy it does require is easily learned in a rather small amount of time, so long as my hand was compatible with the ergonomics of the mouse, I was in good shape. And it freed up my left hand for combination keystrokes and shortcuts and one-handed typing, which definitely requires more deliberate movements and precision than right-handed mousing does for a lefty.
Long signatures suck.
One of the photo captions: "Steve Jobs claimed to be ambidextrous, but as this 1981 photo shows, he wore his watch on his left hand -- a tattletale sign of right-handedness"
Really?! On which hand is an ambidextrous person supposed to wear a watch?
I will acknowledge your obscure facts and respond with my own. I'm a righty, but I deal cards left handed because I was taught by my mother, who is a lefty. You might say that makes sense, except she deals like a righty, and when I learned I properly mirror-imaged her teaching like I did with everything else she showed me. I guess we just both share a family proclivity for dealing cards backwards.
I also learned to mouse lefty when I started suffering carpal tunnel effects. I have gotten some very weird reactions from people trying to use my desk, including an absurd number of "oh! I didn't know you were left handed!" comments from people who have no reason to know or care what my primary hand is, but suddenly seemed to think it was a big deal. I've had a couple of other visitors actually move the mouse over to the right side of the keyboard, despite the fact they were standing and only needed to use the mouse for a few seconds (easily could have just used the mouse where it was) and one person who went so far as to comment as he moved it "you've got the mouse on the wrong side" like I didn't know where I'd left it.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
This is exactly how I am explaining to everyone what the 'ideal' (so it won't be confusing) side of the road is to drive on:
Assumptions:
1. There are two side-by-side seats in front, with a center console for instrumentation.
2. One sits on the opposite side of the side of the road one drives on (e.g. drive on the right, sit on the left).
3. Drivers prefer to use their dominant hand for tasks that require the most precise motor control.
Argument:
Since the console, which holds the gear shift, climate control, GPS, stereo, etc. is in the centre, it depends on what the dominant hand is for the majority of the population. If that happens to be the right hand, the console should be to the right of the driver, hence the driver is sitting in the left seat. With assumption 2 that follows the car should drive on the right-hand side of the road.
Lefties can rejoyce themselves in thinking what it would be like for a right-handed person to learn to drive with a standard stick-shift over in the UK.
When the copyright term is "forever minus a day", live every day like it's the last.
Most recent example of a hand bias that hit major headlines. While I doubt Apple made this mistake by using only right-handed testers and it likely had more to do with minimal testing in poor signal areas, this problem manifested more frequently with the way a lefty held their phone.
Oh yeah, I also play guitar right handed. I actually think this probably gives a benefit to dexterity on the fingerboard, which requires more spacial coordination than simply choosing which string to pluck. So I'm not sure why left handers even want to play using the opposite orientation - especially given that this means you can't just pick up any old guitar at someone's house and play.
which is totally what she said
A few years ago I started setting my desk up lefty: keyboard on the right, mouse on the left. This means that the QWERTY section is dead center and that reaching over to the mouse is a much shorter distance. My typing speed is up considerably and my right wrist no longer bends at a weird angle.
Retraining to mouse left-handed was easy. It took a few days of being a fumbling klutz but now it's completely natural. Having to buy ambidextrous mice really limits your options though.
You lefties DO NOT want a lefty keyboard. That just gets you back to the same dysfunction that I had to escape. I want a lefty keyboard. Does anyone know of a lefty keyboard with light clicky keyswitches (Cherry MX Blues are perfect)?
You are apparently a one handed typer. Comes from fapping so much.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'