Physically Disabled Computer-User Accessibility Aids

I consider myself an expert on this subject because I am disabled and am also a tech geek.

I have Duchene's Muscular Dystrophy with very limited hand or arm movement. It's a progressive disability, which gets successively worse. I haven't been able to type with the computer's keyboard for the past six years. I've been using the computer mouse and voice recognition software to type.

I also use the mouse to control computer games, some of which won't allow the use of mouse, which I'll touch on in another article.

For now, I'll just go into devices & software to type text and navigating & filling forms in. This article is not all-inclusive and mainly for physically disabled people with limited hand movement. If you're interested in devices for the visually impaired, this isn't for you. On we go!

NOTE: I use Windows XP and do so for this article. If you use a Mac OS, this article probably will not help you much. If you use another Windows OR, most of these items haven't changed much since Windows 95. I've no idea about VISTA.

On-Screen Keyboards:

This needs explaining. You might think it's obvious but you'd be surprised by how many people do not understand right away.

An on-Screen keyboard is a keyboard that is on the monitor screen. It's basically a program that takes up a small portion of the screen space and has mouse-clickable letter, number, and punctuation keys. You just move the cursor over the key you want to type and click it. The output usually goes to another window with the blinking place marker or cursor (Notepad, MS Word, webpage input boxes, etc.).

Most on-Screen keyboards have a customizable interface to change, in which the keys are and the order of keys are displayed.

Some keyboards have more keys and offer more control over the computer's functions such as CTRL, ESC, ALT, number pad and the F1-F12 keys. Also, some have macro functions that are particularly useful if you use them.