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we'd hear a lot more cases of RSII think you dramatically underestimate how many people suffer from RSI and how much it affects their lives. In the US alone, we are talking about millions of people. In some surveys >50% of keyboard workers have complained about wrist pain from typing.
There was some planned OSHA office worker ergonomics enforcement in the late 1990s, carefully studied for a decade before being finally put into place in 2001 just as Clinton was leaving office, but it got killed by GOP congress and the Bush II administration. If not for that we would hear more about this problem, and there would be a lot more options for ergonomic keyboards today. Instead, this became a problem that employers blamed on their workers and left workers to figure out for themselves.
> position of keyboard in 3D space relative to the operator, position of hands on keyboard, typing style, health of the operator, operator's workflow, etc.
Yes of course. And things were to some extent better when almost all of the people using keyboards were trained professional secretaries.
From walking around large offices full of computer programmers, I would speculate that at least 3/4 of current office workers have inappropriately positioned and oriented keyboards; maybe even 90% or more.
The biggest problem (among many) with modern equipment/practice is that people type with unstraight wrists, slouch or lean over in their chairs, and stick their elbows out forward or way out to the side.
The keyboard should be held close to the torso and angled so that its top is parallel to the forearms (what this angle should be depends on relative height of torso and table or keyboard tray). Typists should keep their wrists as straight as possible (not flexed or extended; pronation is unfortunately unavoidable on a standard keyboard), and should have their palms and wrists “floating” above the keyboard while actively typing. The primary goal should be to avoid any nontrivial static load on any muscles throughout the body, and try to keep joint positions neutral.
Splitting the keyboard in half, separating the two halves by at least a few inches, and independently positioning and orienting each half can make a huge improvement.
> [If] QWERTY is as bad as HN commenters make out [...]
There are very few HN commenters who care at all about QWERTY, and even most of those are relatively ambivalent. It’s a design poorly matched to modern hardware, and changing it can make a nontrivial improvement, but it’s also not the main problem.