Across the pond

Frustrating late morning trying to do something for the daughter of our friends in Bath, who has to write her essays, using a combination of the knuckle of one hand on a conventional keyboard and a voice recognition system called Dragon Naturally Speaking. But when I was there yesterday I found that the Dragon software had been wiped and the wireless keyboard she was using had annoyingly stopped communicating with her computer.

So went into altkeyboards, the user group, which was inspired by August Dvorak, who not only designed a better keyboard layout than QWERTYin the 1930s, he designed Dvorak layouts for people with only one hand and for those with no hands at all, who used a stick, guided by their forehead. The last useful comment on voice recognition was in 2001, which is the Stone Age as far as the new technology is concerned. And I could find nothing useful at all about keyboards using a stick.

So I went into Google. Joy. The first reference was to MIT, which in my book is just about the best university in the world for computers. Sure enough they had a section on Dragon Naturally Speaking, the best in the world for PC’s, but NOT available for the Apple Mac. For the Mac the MIT lot suggested IBM Via Voice.

At that point I decided to give up, because yesterday I was sure that I was staring at a giant Apple Mac screen in front of the bed. Maybe I am suffering from the dread disease of too much early morning blogging.

So I opened the post. Joy. We have won the lottery for a beach hut. So off we went to inspect it, catching the beach superintendent just before he left for lunch. He gave us the key for the hut, which is the one he currently occupies himself. There is ample room for the kids’ buckets and spades. There is even enough room for a card table so that, if I am so minded, I can blog a pebble’s throw away from the ocean.

So my mood soared again. Maybe there are some Gods up there and maybe they do answer prayers.

I was too tired when I got back to do any more Googling. So I decided to take my cue from The Great Book. Ask and it shall be granted, or some such.

But just to hedge my bets I decided to put my question to the Blogosphere before I knelt down to pray.

Surely there must be some human being out there who knows of a viable stick type wireless keyboard and who knows whether Via Voice actually is a better alternative for someone with only one knuckle available to input a three thousand word essay.