I would reach out to Charachorder and ask if you can get a priority shipment of one of their products. They spend a lot of time making informative videos about their product, and disabilities is a significant use case. If your friend is willing to make the tradeoff of a steep learning curve for raw input speed, this seems like your best bet. I have never personally used the device, but from what I can see, it requires very little finger movement.
Ask HN: Options for One-Handed Typing
61–70 of 99 posts
Re: Ask HN: Options for One-Handed Typing
#62I intermittently use a Twiddler (older version). The learning curve is initially steep but fine with practice. It's not cheap but it's not that expensive, and it works for mousing as well: https://www.tekgear.com/twiddler-4-wrap.html
I've also used an early version of the twiddler. It is a very nice keyboard with mouse integration. It seems they have upgraded the product.
Re: Ask HN: Options for One-Handed Typing
#63Jeff Geerling recently posted a video of a keyboard with inbuilt speech to text, my might be of interest!
Re: Ask HN: Options for One-Handed Typing
#64I went through the same as few years ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26710046
It depends on what you're doing but the biggest help to me was the dictate button in outlook to draft email then just edit, probably a lot more use now with copilot etc. Your friend needs to be prepared for a significant drop in productivity at the computer and at home. Even simple things like making a sandwich or getting dressed will be difficult and slow, especially at the start.
Re: Ask HN: Options for One-Handed Typing
#65Special keyboards for one-handed typing are probably very expensive because of two reasons. First the small market, not a lot of potential customers, a lot of development costs and high per-unit production costs. And second because they are often paid for by insurance or a public program to bring people with disabilities to the workplace. It's a bargain for insurance to buy a keyboard for 1000$ and enable a person to do their job, instead of paying for decades of sick leave.
Re: Ask HN: Options for One-Handed Typing
#66[dead]
Re: Ask HN: Options for One-Handed Typing
#67Surprised no one mentioned this, but voice dictation is pretty good in both Windows and MacOS. Would it be possible to use a combination of one hand and voice dictation, AI text prediction (autocomplete), etc?
Re: Ask HN: Options for One-Handed Typing
#68Aah!
Just in time...
Though a bit late to the party!!
I'm on the recovery path of my dominant hand boxer's fracture... A month and a few weeks to go yet for the cast removal...
Surprisingly got used to type with two fingers and minimal movement though have to place the external keyboard at an awkward angle.
My 2 cents would be to try out a few existing possibilities before investing heavily on alternates. Sometimes all such just-for-the-time-extensions (or should I call it contraptions?) do not have a useful after life after the utilization or in-need-of period.
I have had many injuries / broken bones (or at least 7 more times! (And please don't judge me based on this. I'm either that clumsy or those were freak incidents...)) and none that were created / acquired to help me out during those restricted movement periods have stayed with me...
Anyways, the mileage may vary... My short advice... Try for sometime (if you could get somethings loaned or borrowed) for a short / extended-short periods and invest...
Tough times and best wishes and speedy recovery to get back on feet and to a healthy normal!
This too shall pass...
Re: Ask HN: Options for One-Handed Typing
#69I intermittently use a Twiddler (older version). The learning curve is initially steep but fine with practice. It's not cheap but it's not that expensive, and it works for mousing as well: https://www.tekgear.com/twiddler-4-wrap.html
I've also used an early version of the twiddler. It is a very nice keyboard with mouse integration. It seems they have upgraded the product. https://www.mytwiddler.com/
Thirded on Twiddler. I didn't use it myself, but I worked with some people who were very productive with it. One was even said to have written their dissertation laying down, with a Twiddler and a HUD.
Separate from that, when I've temporarily injured one hand/arm or the other, typing on a QWERTY keyboard wasn't that slow for me. Especially if I typed all-lowercase. Though my normal typing style has two hands moving around the keyboard a bit; I don't know whether traditional home-row typists would fine one-handed more difficult.
(Just be careful when Web searching about this topic at work, since it's bumping into an old euphemism joke on Reddit.)
Re: Ask HN: Options for One-Handed Typing
#70I had a family member who broke a finger on their prominent hand and used the left-handed Dvorak layout while it healed, getting up to about 40 WPM: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dvorak_keyboard_layout#One-han...
Dvorak left and right have the distinction of being available out of the box on most successful operating systems.
Advice from when I learned Dvorak: post a picture of the keyboard layout at monitor height (I put it on my background) so you can figure out where the characters are without looking down.