Forum Discussion
Accessibility for authors - protecting our health
I'm writing this after a long day working in storyline for the majority of the time. Like most people, I do have my frustrations with storyline, but lately my main problems have been related to the ...
For most of my 30+ years, I have used a Kensington Expert Mouse Wired Trackball. The detachable wrist rest means my wrist is at a neutral angle, the large ball is easy to roll around with my fingers, the scroll ring allows me to scroll large documents much easier than click-hold-drag, let go, click-hold-drag, let go, lather, rinse, repeat. Cursor speed and the 4 buttons are customizable (I use "chorded" buttons a lot for paste and navigation operations).
Considering how many little apps with questionable usefulness Micro$oft drops on the current versions of Windows, it's unfortunate one isn't a utility equivalent to the old MacroMaker for Macintosh from the late 80s-early 90s. I got a LOT of use out of that little utility, with programs which had few or no keyboard equivalents (kinda like the situation we're in now). It had a considerable amount of horsepower, and was aware of which program you were running at the time. Being able to assign keyboard equivalents to specific sequences on the ribbon would seem to be a no-brainer, yet, here we are.
Hi Joseph :) Thanks for the suggestion. My biggest problem seems to be the buttons rather than just the mouse itself. It's the clicking that does the most harm. Does the trackball have features that would reduce that?
I've tried a vertical mouse before with no success...I've had a pen tablet for years as well, but I don't find it so useful outside of graphics applications these days. It's more of a faff than the mouse so I find myself using that more.
I have set up shortcuts with Dragon so I can speak them, but as you say it's limited by the software. It has Macro functions but I find they work too unpredictably to be worth much.
