Recently I got a question from a reader in Post Falls. He was trying to solve a problem for a friend of his and said:
"He has developed a very bad hand tremor and is confined to a wheelchair. His wife lets him play games and do a few things on the computer that he really enjoys. The problem is that he shakes so bad that we had to turn the right mouse button off or he’d get everything all locked up. I was trying to find a way…to fix it so his wife can use the right button from time to time without having to go back in and turn it on."
As it turned out, I’d just read the solution to that problem. The reader suspected that there had to be a keyboard shortcut to access the menu and it turned out he was right.
You can do an equivalent of a "right-click" using the keyboard. Anytime you need to right-click the desktop, an active window, or a highlighted shortcut, you can press Shift+F10 instead.
For example, if you are in Windows Explorer and you click on a file to highlight it, then press Shift+F10, you get the little pop-up menu that lets you open it, look at properties, and so on.
Not everyone has the same physical abilities. If the keyboard shortcuts aren’t enough, there are many alternative hardware and software products available to help people who have difficulty using their keyboard or mouse to enter data. There are alternative keyboards, on-screen keyboards, trackballs, joysticks, various switches, voice recognition, and other products.
The Inclusion Daily Express web site (www.inclusiondaily.com) is a great starting point for learning about accessibility issues. Their Links page has links to many sites about assistive technology. It also includes information about Web accessibility, such as screen readers that turn on-screen text into a synthesized voice, so that blind computer users can surf the Web.
Many computer technologies were actually originally developed for people with different abilities, so there’s no reason that people should feel excluded from using computers. With a little initiative, you can probably find a way to make your computing experience easier, no matter what your physical ability.