FWIW I have the same issue (fat thumbs, low dexterity), and SwiftKey really helps me there. I can type something like tjiz oa a trsq and it’ll autocorrect it to this is a test just based on “what letters were near that thumb, and what makes sense given the previous word”. I find it better at correcting mistakes than GBoard… and apparently Microsoft agrees with me (it was once an indie product before Microsoft bought them out).
PS Nevermind the “AI keyboard” marketing… that’s something Microsoft recently added, trying to shoehorn Copilot into it like everything else they make (but you can disable it). The base autocorrect functionality is not a LLM and doesn’t require you to send anything to Copilot; it’s just an old-fashioned text prediction engine like we had in the 2010s.
I have a friend who can do this. Watching her text is fascinating (for a minute). She is astonishingly fast. I’m not slow but not fast either. She can churn out five texts in 30 seconds (yeah…she’s one of those people which means my phone goes ding every few seconds).
Like you, I can’t figure out how she does it (I have seen young people do this but they were born with a smartphone practically and hone their skill to text during class and not get caught).
If you usually carry a pen around you might consider one with that rubber(like) tip which will activate the touch sensors on the phone screen. I find them to be a bit easier and more accurate to use than using my fingers.