When I first heard about this, I was really struck. But it made all the sense. There are more than a million people just in the US living without at least one of their hands, and statistics say that this number will grow by 50,000 every year. It is sad and heartbreaking, but it is a fact; so that someone had come up with a way for a person to type with one hand, shouldn’t be surprising at all.
Now, maybe, the rest of us we may just be doing it wrong altogether. Think about it, most of the time one of our left hand is just sitting on the keyboard while the other one is doing most of the work, especially if you are like me and there are a lot of Backspace hits. I am also not the first one to think about this, as one-handed keyboards are quite a thing in the gaming world.
This made me think, What type of technology, originally created for special needs could we use for our advantage? It happens to be that there are plenty of examples of assistive technology turning into everyday products, including the Segway, the Speech to text on your phone, and Siri’s text-to-speech, among them.
Technology doesn’t care what you created it for, so we might as well give it try!