Heya hey,

So I've had this 3 month stint at a Customer Support job this year, which was overall a positive experience as I'd been isolated from human contact more or less for a couple of years at that point ... met a lot of people from all over the world, it was educational. Long story short, there was this guy who had most of his fingers on his hands missing because of flesh-eating bacteria. He did not type very fast.

This got me thinking:

Why not create a typing program (game) that teaches people with less than 5 fingers on each hand type as fast as they can? This is not a commercial app, something I will try to make in my 1st year of java at uni probably come September just for practice, but everyone I spoke to said it's a stupid-ass idea except my colleague who was afflicted by this horrific bacteria, who loved the idea and his brother. Everyone else said, "Most people have 10 fingers!" or "WTF LOL."

If you've between 1 and 9 digits missing on your hands, would you still position your fingers the same way, or would speed-typing be affected by which fingers you have on which hand (how you position your hands, that is). What do you think?

But people are really adaptable. I've seen people still type adequately with a broken finger. I've seen people type on a smartphone quickly with two fingers dedicated to holding the phone up and upright.

The bigger question is how would an app/program teach people sans fingers to type better on a standard qwerty keyboard? And how would it do things differently than a standard typing teaching program?

I don't even think regular typing teaching programs truly worked, like the ones I was forced to sit through in middle school many times. The best typing teachers were games like JK and Quake where I had to type comments before I got fragged.

I was thinking to have it ask the user to position their fingers differently in the resting position depending on which fingers they have, maximizing the reach, and then teaching them to blind-type from this position. I'd learnt typing in middle school as well (typing game), to me it was undoubtedly useful.

But couldn't that be satisfied by an informative picture? And maybe the guy at work is typing as fast as he physically can. I mean, he is missing fingers.

He wasn't blind-typing. He had to look at the keyboard. He was typing relatively fast all things considered, I suppose, but I think if he'd been trained to blind-type he'd type so much faster. That's kind of the question -- if you're missing fingers, would the configuration (for lack of a better term) of your fingers come into play when learning how to type effectively, or would just learning as if you had 5 fingers on each hand be sufficient?

Anybody who knows how to work the piano keys (or a guitar for that matter) knows that at various times it makes sense to use "awkward" fingering out of local convenience.

There are also plenty of Emacs users who gave learned not to overuse their pinky like they are expected to. Of course some just remap the keys....

I'm sorry, but I'm not sure how this is relevant to the question at hand.

If I chopped off a finger of an already established piano keyboardist, s/he would have little trouble doing what s/he already does all the time-that is, transposing fingering out of convenience. So I'd say this is evidence in favor of your poll option #1.

But reading your original post text in full, well good luck if you're missing almost all your fingers. At that point I would suggest a chording keyboard.

I see. Thanks for explaining. I'm not convinced an "established" pianist wouldn't learn to play differently technique-wise to compensate for his physical disability, however.

I never learned official 10 finger typing. I learned to type fast by typing "cd games; cd keen; keen" as soon as the computer was booted. So my typing already is independent of any resting position and I can still type blind. Sure I'm slower with less fingers. But that's just because the fingers have to travel more.

Yup, that's sort of the idea: have fingers travel the least possible distance by "teaching" an optimal resting position directly dependent on which fingers the user has.

I remember Commander Keen. I preferred that side-scroller where you had to go and brutally kill mutants (I think) in some urban block. You start from where your plane crashed at the beginning of the level, it was a pretty violent game. And also that other sidescroller where you play a dude wearing strange pajamas and the view of the screen is as if you're looking from a control room along with a bunch of technicians or scientsists or whoever watching your guy walk around shoot stuff. That latter one was in mind-blowing 256 VGA! Don't remember what it was called either.

Got totally sidetracked.

That's almost certainly true.

Um, I just realized how utterly stupid this suggestion was. Sorry.

You want a serial input system, not a parallel one. I suggest Morse code.

Actually, something that comes to mind is the input system I am using right now: namely, Android's "swipe the letters in a continuous stroke of the thumb + autocorrect".

Not in the target audience, but kudos for trying to help.

Make sure you CYA. Distributing something for disabled people / rehabilitation might pass the legal bar for a medical device, even if you're giving it away for free. You'd probably never get sued or fined but I don't know your risk tolerance.

Bio Menace. I loved it!
You can play it for free from here: https://archive.org/details/BioMenace



Doesn't ring a bell. Now I want to play it. :/




Don't worry, I'll continue the tradition.

Bio Menace is the one. Thanks. As for the other game, found it! It's Crime Wave!

http://www.abandonia.com/en/games/535/Crime+Wave.html