Eric S. Johansson wrote:
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.
You can get giant piano keyboards that you step on, so how about a giant
computer keyboard? "I wrote 5 miles of code before lunch!" :-)
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