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Old 12-09-2012, 08:01 AM
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Songfellow Songfellow is offline
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Location: Michigan, USA
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Songfellow Songfellow is offline
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Join Date: Dec 2012
Location: Michigan, USA
Posts: 85
10 yr Member
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Quote:
Originally Posted by johnt View Post
There's a good chance that everyone else in the forum knows this already. In which case, please accept my apologies. But, in case there's others like me who find it difficult to type, and who haven't realised that the Accessibility settings in Windows can help them, they are worth looking at.

For instance, when I'm "off" I type with one finger, which is a problem if you want to type $. You can get around this in Windows 7 (I suspect it's much the same in all versions) by:

Start (icon normally bottom left)
Control Panel
Ease of Access
Change how your keyboard works
Turn on Sticky Keys
Apply

Now to type $, say, you press shift and let it go. Then, when you press the 4 key, you get "upper case 4", which is $, as required.

This setting makes more than the shift key sticky. For instance, the Ctrl key is sticky, so to save a file, you can press the Ctrl key followed by s; the Alt key is sticky, so to close a window you can press the Alt key followed by the F4 key; the Windows key (the key on the bottom row that looks like a flag in a circle) is sticky, so to move a window to the left press the Windows key followed by the left arrow key.

I also have problems with keys being wrongly repeated. For instance, I want to type the word forum but I get fooorum. Or when going back to correct the mistake I overrun, deleting good text as well as bad. To reduce this problem, you can slow the speed at which the cursor moves. From where we were above:

Click on the Keyboard settings link near the bottom.
On the Keyboard Properties tab you can increase the "Repeat Delay" and reduce the "Repeat Rate" by moving the sliders to the left. (I find about a quarter of the way from the left gives me the best results.)
Apply
OK

Has anyone else got typing tips?

John
John, thanks for the tips. One other alternative might be Dragon software. When my voice volume is loud enough I've had reasonable success using Dragon NaturallySpeaking voice to speech software. It's really unstable in Windows XP (I had to re-install it 3 times which was a major nuisance) but since my PC crashed and needed all new hardware, I upgraded to Windows 7. It works well enough now. It can be really nice talking into a microphone and having the computer type the words for me.

Steve
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"Thanks for this!" says:
johnt (12-09-2012)