Someone I know recently broke their arm. Quite a bad break, likely needs surgery to fix. Whatever happens, they will be without use of their right-arm for a couple months at least and they are right handed. I asked and they said while the hand still “works” it is essentially useless to do things like type (which is a large part of their work).
So, are their any decent ways to stay productive while the arm is incapacitated? I know voice recognition has gotten pretty good but is it enough? Is there a way to integrate it into email and and web browsers that is reasonably easy and workable? Something else?
The person has their own business so no one else to pick-up the slack.
You make it work. I had shoulder surgery on my right shoulder a few years ago. Other than moving my adding machine over to the left side of my desk with my phone, it was just a matter of fumbling for a few days and then I was mostly fine.
I dealt with this a year ago, when I broke my right elbow.
It slowed everything down, a lot. The angle at which my right arm was splinted (for the two weeks before the repair surgery, and another week afterwards) completely precluded any computer typing with that hand. Typing on the computer became hunt-and-peck with my left hand, slowing me down from about 70 wpm typing (I’m a good touch typist), to maybe 10.
I was able to use voice recognition on my phone for texting (with varying levels of accuracy), but I didn’t really try it on my laptop – and I wouldn’t have been allowed to install a speech-to-text program onto my work laptop, anyway.
I had a stroke that weakened my right hand so that I couldn’t type with it for several months. I hunted and pecked with my left hand and I bought a left-handed mouse, which only took a short while to adapt to. Yes, my productivity was seriously affected but not stopped completely. I didn’t mention it on the Dope and I doubt anyone noticed the small dip in posts until I healed.
Huntin’ and Peckin’ is tedious but it works.
I was able to use my right hand pretty good before my left was fit again.
But I’m slightly ambi-
I learned to draw and print right handed in art school with poor success but I kept trying and it improved in a relatively short time period.
Your friend will be doing more than he believes, I’ll bet by the time he’s healed.
The voice stuff doesn’t work for me, for other reasons, (Stutter). Maybe he’ll have good luck there.
I’m reminded of the story of the Hungarian pistol shooter Károly Takács whose right, shooting, hand was badly injured by a grenade, so he switched to shooting with his left hand and won two Olympic gold medals with it.
Speech recognition is built into most operating systems these days, both desktop and mobile, as an accessibility feature. They’re pretty good at transcribing plain English (as opposed to code or professional jargon).
The new generation AI stuff like Whisper (free side product from ChatGPT/OpenAI) is even better, quite dramatically so.
If you try the voice mode in ChatGPT, it’s pretty much just like having a conversation. Nearly perfect accuracy and it can understand your intent even if you misspeak, so it can easily help you compose an email or write a script or do some research. On your own computer, you can also download the Whisper software and use it for free just for the speech recognition part.
That said, it’d still be a pain in the ass to navigate most software by voice alone. The operating system has some built in accessibility tools for this where you can tell it to move to the next window or button and click this or format that, etc., but it’s not too easy to use and it depends on the software itself having good accessibility features. Those are mostly hidden from people without audio visual disabilities, so you never really get to practice using them until you really need them.
Probably the more practical solution is to pay for short term disability insurance and take a vacation while you heal…
If this is a long term disability, it’s a more difficult situation of course They do make one handed chording keyboards, foot pedals, integrated touchpads, eye trackers, head trackers, gesture controls, etc., but all of those will take some getting used to. And none of them will perfectly replace mouse and keyboard, especially in specialized niche software that might not have bothered to tie into the OS accessibility features quite as much.
And there’s all the experimental brain interfaces on the horizon, but that’s not generally available yet.
Back when I was making a living as a temporary employee through a service one of the jobs I was assigned was pretty much that - a woman had slashed her hand quite thoroughly, required surgery and an extended recovery. My job was to do her typing and any other thing requiring two hands during her recovery. Yes, she was fairly high up the hierarchy in her company to get that sort of assistance.
A man I knew lost his right arm to cancer. It took him about 6 months to adjust to writing left handed. This was in the days before computers were ubiquitous. He recovered enough to become chair of his department. I once went out to a dinner that included him and he asked the waitress to cut up his steak.
Several years ago I broke my dominant wrist and, for a couple of months I simply had to use my “wrong” hand. I could look through my various notes that I took at work and see, from one day to the next, when my hand-writing went really bad. I’m not sure that there’s much else to do or that can be done IMHO.
I work on a computer 8+ hours a day. 7 years back, I had wrist surgery, which meant that my right arm was not usable at all for over a month. That was… fun. I was off work entirely for 3-4 weeks but when I went back, my arm was still not terribly usable.
I got voice-to-text software (Dragon - my company issued me a license as a disability accommodation) which sounds grand, but Dragon doesn’t speak SQL. And my need for it was short-term enough that I never got really proficient at making it do what I needed.
But in general, something like that may be the solution.
Years earlier, I had broken my elbow and it was difficult / impossible to mouse for a few weeks. At that point I learned how to mouse pretty proficiently with my left hand, something I’d never been able to do before. It’s been a useful skill.
I’m a programmer. I wasn’t allowed to type with my dominant hand for a few weeks after my elbow surgery. I survived with a mix of slower lefty typing, and my boss being ok with me focusing on code reviews and debugging instead of writing lots of code.
Historically, things like Dragon can be very good as replacements. I have a friend who has MS and at least used to use it exclusively. But I can’t imagine trying to write code with it. So part of the answer would be “it depends on what they do on the computer.”
I did go out for a steak dinner the day after my surgery, and my friend had to cut my steak for me
I injured my right wrist and couldn’t use that hand for several weeks. I don’t remember it being a huge problem for typing (just slowed me down a bit), but using a mouse left handed was a bit awkward at first. Reversing the buttons helped, but at that time I often had to remotely connect to another computer, which caused the buttons to flip back. That was confusing.
Wow. I’ve had four wrist SX (carpal tunnel release x2, TFCC repair, pisiformectomy) and I’m a remote programmer. Nobody ever suggested STD. I think I missed out!
But yeah, I just was less productive for a while. Probably helps that I’m pretty senior (or is that “senile”?) and so people knew I wasn’t malingering.
On the bright side, doc agreed that one more punch on my card and the next one after that is free!
They do make one handed chording keyboards, foot pedals, integrated touchpads, eye trackers, head trackers, gesture controls, etc., but all of those will take some getting used to. And none of them will perfectly replace mouse and keyboard, especially in specialized niche software that might not have bothered to tie into the OS accessibility features quite as much.
