M4m48·Dec 28, 2014
I also have hand problems. I use speech recognition to type everything, including code, and a game controller to move around the mouse. The controller I'm currently using, a PS4 controller, has a trackpad in the middle, so I was able to mash that against my face and give her technique a shot.
It works better than you'd think. The PS4 trackpad isn't exactly brilliant, but I can move around the mouse and click on what I want to with some accuracy. Of course, the trackpad on the controller is very small and not very accurate, so it's not really practical for artwork or anything. But, with a better, larger trackpad, I can imagine this technique actually working. I might give it a shot at some point.
I am a bit worried about the inevitable neck and nose pain, though. I wish she had gone into a little more detail about how she avoids that. Mayb
Read the rest
e she just has a neck of steel?
For the curious, these are some other resources I've found about people working around RSI. Most of these are about using Dragon NaturallySpeaking to code by voice, since that's what I'm most interested in, but I think it's still interesting.
There really needs to be a list somewhere for open-source workarounds to disabilities. To the best of my knowledge, there really isn't one.
Natlink + Dragon NaturallySpeaking:
(NatLink, which lets you make custom speech commands for Dragon in Python, is currently being developed at http://qh.antenna.nl/unimacro/index.html, but that site's pretty incomprehensible. The original author's site is at http://www.synapseadaptive.com/joel/welcomeapage.htm. It's pretty out of date, but explains the fundamentals of the system better, I think.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SkdfdXWYaI (don't bother looking around, the source code of this was never released)
https://github.com/simianhacker/code-by-voice
https://github.com/tgrosinger/aenea-grammars
Libraries for using Dragon NaturallySpeaking on Linux with VMs:
https://github.com/dictation-toolbox/aenea
https://github.com/russell/damselfly
It seems a post about this kind of thing pops up about every other month or so. I'm thinking of showing off my system here when I polish it up a bit. It's not nearly as complicated as some of these other ones, but I'm beginning to get pretty close to normal typing speed coding by voice.