Use your Mac the way I do | Blake Watson

A phenomenally interesting journey through one person's assistive set-up, using only the left mouse button to navigate the web, code websites, play video games, and everything else in-between.

On a better keyboard layout for limited cursor-travel, pointer-only typing:

...you come across the Chubon keyboard layout, which seems to be optimized for your very situation—it places common letters toward a center grouping where they’re easy to click with less pointer travel.

On the many superpowers of the macOS Accessibility Keyboard:

The built-in Panel Editor gives you the ability to edit the panel or create new ones. This means you can create your very own keyboard layout! The Panel Editor is powerful. You can add not only the basic keys but also buttons which execute key combos, invoke system actions, input strings of text, and more.

On some unexpected accessibility benefits of supporting Markdown:

Note-taking apps like Bear that use Markdown for formatting are great because you can avoid using keyboard shortcuts or UI controls for formatting—and you added dedicated punctuation buttons to your keyboard so that you don’t need to press Shift to access characters like the asterisk or underscore.

On a tool for making your mouse behave like a touch event in macOS browsers:

The browser extension ScrollAnywhere lets you click and drag on webpages to scroll them—much like you would on a mobile touchscreen.

On how you can use voice commands to play video games:

Since Talon gives you the ability to verbalize keypresses, your mouse pointer is freed from typing duty. This is important for being able to play games that require camera control via the mouse.

On how tools can be combo'ed to turn a single mouse input into a whole stack of augmentations and efficiencies:

You started with nothing more than a one-button mouse. But from there you expanded the capabilities of that humble device, giving yourself keyboard access, shortcuts and macros, assistive tech tools, and powerful voice input capability.

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Code with your voice

Cursorless is a very cool VS Code plugin that uses Talon (voice-control assistive tech) to navigate around codebases, write and edit code, and do just about anything else. Even if that isn't […]
  • A phenomenally interesting journey through one person's assistive set-up, using only the left mouse button to navigate the web, code websites, play video games, and everything else […]
  • Murray Adcock.
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