Horace Blegg wrote: > I've been kinda following this. I have a cousin who is permanently wheel > chair bound and doesn't have perfect control of her hands, but still > manages to use a computer and interact with society. However, the > idea/thought of disabled programmers was new to me/hadn't ever occurred > to me. > > You say that using your hands is painful, but what about your feet? > Wouldn't it be possible to rig up some kind of foot peddle for > shift/caps lock? Kinda like the power peddle used with sowing machines, > so the hands are free to hold fabric. > > I don't mean this in a condescending manor, and I apologize if you take > it as such. I'm genuinely curious if you think something like this could > work. > > The way I was envisioning it working last night (and I haven't the > faintest clue how SR works, nor have I ever used SR) was that you would > hit the foot peddle, which would tell the SR program to capitalize the > first letter of the next word (a smart shift, basically, so you don't > end up doing something like ... WONderland -or- "stocks are up 1,0))% > TOday".) > > Possible? Stupid? > it's not stupid.
People have used foot pedals for decades for a variety of controls. I don't think foot pedals would work for me because when I am dictating, I pace. Standing, sitting, I pace. With a cord headset, I'm forced to stay within about 4 feet of the computer. But what I'm using a Bluetooth headset, I will sometimes ramble as far as 10 or 15 feet from the computer. It helps if I make the font larger so I can glance over and see what kind of errors I've gotten. I really love a Bluetooth headset with speech recognition. It's so liberating. Your question about foot pedals makes me think of alternative. would it make sense to have a handheld keyboard which would be used for command-and-control functionality or as an adjunct to speech recognition use? It would have to be designed in such a way that it doesn't aggravate a hand injury which may not be possible. Anyway, just thinking out loud. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
