I had a PC/Typing class in school. I never ended up using it. I basically learned the way I type from playing WoW and other online games with text chats. I mostly use my left hand for typing and occasionally use my right for some keys briefly.
I’m sure if I took a typing speed test I wouldn’t be as fast as someone using the home keys, but it’s worked well enough for me.
I grew up in an era of sneaking into the living room to use the family desktop in the middle of the night to talk to random strangers in yahoo chat rooms.
I also learned how to type with just my left hand…
I learnt to use these… Completely without instruction. I move my hands as I type and alternate my fingers by default.
I’ve tried touch typing tutorials, where I’m meant to keep my fingers within a ‘zone’, however it was causing my hands to cramp once I reached 90 WPM.These little indicators are lovely for touch typing though, even if I’m not doing it ‘properly’. No repetitive strain injury in my weird way of typing without looking though!
Same here. The lines let me know where my fingers are in relation to the keyboard. Mavis Beacon would scream if she saw how I type, but I can do it at around 90wpm without looking.
I always saw it as “speed-braille”.
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Touch typing means a whole different thing now lol
you’re blind ? using lemmy ? dude please talk more , how ? heck how did you even see the image ?!
I worked with a guy doing tech support that was blind. It was fascinating. He couldn’t of course see images. He would often ask me what was on the screen so he could help the caller. He used a Braille keyboard. It was awesome. Basically scroll line by line and the keyboard pops up the line enabling him to read it.
That’s super awesome. Your employer was doing a good thing enabling that
Yeah he was a really crazy interesting guy. At one point in time I actually let him drive my car in the parking lot because he said he had never driven a car before and he was always curious about it. Scariest 10 minutes of my life but it was an awesome blast to do that. He actually did pretty good at taking direction except for when we hit a curb because I told him to turn two sharp going around some of the berms.
Blind doesn’t mean they can’t see anything. Just that they have impaired vision.
My mother used to work for the Minnesota State Services for the Blind, so I grew up around a bunch of blind people. Most of them could partially see. They were considered “legally blind.” But they still needed tools to help them “see” better.
That’s what my mother’s job did; they provided access to equipment to assist blind people in their day-to-day lives. Converting books into braille or audio recordings, supplying walking canes, tape decks, and access to other resources to help them out.
They also gave out radios tuned to their own station, and they had a broadcasting studio in the office where employees or volunteers would just read newspapers or magazines for blind people to listen to over the radio.
Granted, my memory of all this was back before the Internet was a thing. I’m sure there are more advanced tools for this modern day and age that help with computer access.
Why call them blind then? The definition of blind says 1/10 or less of normal vision. There’s no way you can read text on a phone or computer with that.
I always assumed blind people just used TTS and voice reading.
Blindness comes in many different forms. It’s not about your vision being blurred or completely dark. Some blind people can only see clearly through tiny slits or pinholes in their vision.
Imagine a sheet of paper that you poke maybe 2 or 3 small holes in, then hold up a few inches from your face. Those holes are all you can see through in your field of vision; the rest is obscured.
And then there are people who need bottle-lensed glasses just to be able to barely read large 100-pt text in front of their face. They’re considered blind, even though they have some vision.
My mother had a Polish friend from her work who was like this. He had insanely thick glasses and walked mostly without a cane in familiar areas, but would have to touch your face to gauge your reaction while talking with you. Or practically press his face up against yours to look you in the eye. He had a laptop that would scan documents and display them in massive font so he could read them on the go.
Also, one of my best friends in high school woke up blind one day. His corneas detached from his eyeballs; a genetic defect from his family. He didn’t wake up in a dark room, he could still see shapes and colors. But he couldn’t focus on any of them.
I was tasked with walking him to each of his classes in school, because I had experience leading the blind. His greatest annoyance was when people waved their hand in front of his face and asked if he could see it. When he flinched (because a large blurry object came at his head), they accused him of faking blindness because he saw them. But he couldn’t make out what was coming at him, he was just reacting to sudden movements near his face.
My friend eventually got corneal transplants, which restored most of his vision. But he can never drive a car because his vision isn’t good enough to read road signs, even with corrective lenses. He’s considered legally blind.
When you need to split hairs, blind folks will call themselves “legally blind” if they have some limited sight, or “totally/completely blind” if they have no vision whatsoever. But if your optometrist claims you qualify for legally blind, you’re generally considered blind amongst their community and qualify for any associated disability benefits that come with blindness.
I see, makes sense. Thank you for the explanation.
Being blind is a spectrum, but even ‘fully’ blind people can use phones and computers with a screen reader.
Alt-text allows people to describe images, OCR can recognise text in images, and now AI can also describe images.
Blind people aren’t helpless, incapable or dependent, like some stereotypes might lead you to believe. Many are able to live relatively normal, independent lives.
Some even play videogames and stream on twitch.But some find constantly being asked the same questions and needing to inform others that they aren’t incapable to be quite annoying. Especially when this sort of info is readily available online.
I looked it up , didn’t find that much I didn’t call him incapable , I didn’t put any thing negative towards him , I was just curious !
I never said you did, and it’s perfectly normal to be curious.
It’s just that blind people have to answer these same uninformed questions all the time, and it can be tiring.Saying you did look it up seems worse to me than saying you didn’t.
One acknowledges a lack of effort, the other implies notable effort and failure at a relatively simple task.
No judgement intended, I’m just trying to instill some introspection. I’ll leave you be now.
Screen readers have gotten pretty good. They can use OCR to read text on an image if it’s not too jpeg’d and there’s even some that can describe the image a bit.
Many communities also have rules that you have to add captions to your images.
Those are for people who can type without looking ;)
They didn’t teach typing when I was in school. I guess it’s an assumed skill? Anywho, I still knew what those notches/bumps were for :3
Out of curiosity, about when were you in grade school? I learned touch typing in the late 90s in middle school. I remember laminated construction paper taped to each keyboard so we could learn visually first, then had to flip it over and cover our hands to start developing the muscle memory for each set of keys.
We didn’t start IT until 5th grade, which would’ve been in 2012-2013 :3
Not who you asked but I was in highschool in the 2010s and they had a typing class but it was an elective.
80s kid here, we learned on typewriters and the shared apple ii in the library. I was good at it because I knew piano and it just settled easy in my mind.
I made it mandatory for my kids to learn because I just knew this shit would be needed. Also didn’t allow for short words like LOL until they could type it out. Daughter got to a point where her “laugh out loud” was amazingly fast and she begged me to let her “be normal” lmfao.
The bumps exist so you can have an existential doubt of when will they wear out. Apparently my current keyboard was a better choice than I thought at first.
Why would then wearing out be so terrible?
theyre basically required for touch typing (without looking at the keyboard)
They aren’t required at all for touch typing, they are just convenient.
Source:i touch type over 100wpm and forgot they existed
I don’t look at the keyboard. I don’t do home row either, though. I just put my hands on the table and magically know where the keys are.
The English Wikipedia:
Although the phrase refers to typing without using the sense of sight to find the keys—specifically, a touch typist will know their location on the keyboard through muscle memory—the term is often used to refer to a specific form of touch typing that involves placing the eight fingers in a horizontal row along the middle of the keyboard (the home row) and having them reach for specific other keys. (Under this usage, typists who do not look at the keyboard but do not use home row either are referred to as hybrid typists.) Both two-handed touch typing and one-handed touch typing are possible.
…my work keyboard’s index bumps are worn out; there’s a hint of a bump on the F key but the J key’s worn completely smooth…i broke both of my hands last year and had to hunt-and-peck with seven fingers for awhile; now that i’ve since recovered full use of ten digits, touch-typing is proving a real challenge…
If you don’t mind me asking, how did you break both your hands at the same time? Sounds painful and difficult.
…the injuries weren’t simultaneous; broke one on a solid-core service door and but thankfully i’d regained partial use just before clumsily slamming a car door on the other a few months later…
…both hands were simultaneously disabled, though, and although i’ve regained full use starting this month, my range of motion is still a bit limited with moderate nerve damage…growing less clumsy with mobility exercises every day, though!..
Or they are really old. I have an old PS2 keyboard that doesn’t have them.
They were a feature on typewriter keyboards back before personal computers were even a thing, so I think it’s probably just that Sony didn’t bother to put them on that specific keyboard.
PS/2 was the standard connection type for mice and keyboards for a pretty long time.
maybe yours were shaped differently compared to the other keys.
Well… Ill explain for somebody who doesnt know:
Those are four your index finger. For the left and right hand.
So you can always have a base point for your typing without looking
Those are four your index finger.
But I only have two index fingers. Is that why I’m not good at typing?
I’ll fuckin bite because everyone else missed it.
How are these suppose to help when I have 144+ index fingers??? There’s not enough keys, let alone keys with whatever those little lines are
I mostly type with my index and middle fingers only and type 144+ wpm lol… My wife’s always like “wth”
I’ve met a few people like that. Often they don’t go to the gym or do any form of exercise so this is how they choose to exert around 5,000 to 7,000N/cm2 for each of those keystrokes.
With not a millimetre of irony in their face they then tell you they need this brand of mechanical keyboard because the “cheaper ones all break”.
I had to break the nerd cycle that don’t touch grass, I gym 2 hours a day every day after work. And, don’t you know? The loudest keyboard in the office is the most dominate!! 😂
whoosh
Cool.
Yessir the right way to learn to type was to out spam the spammers in world chat on WoW and trade 1 world on RS in 2005.
It’s not just typing speed. It’s also comfort and strain on your wrists and hand muscles.
Good typing position significantly reduces the risks of carpal tunnel syndrome, among other things.
I strongly disagree. I firmly believe that the “proper form” you and I were taught is why carpal tunnel is so common(I don’t think it one size fits all) People should do what’s comfortable for them. In fact, I’m pushing mid-30 and when I use proper form I get uncomfortable pain, and if I get a chair that doesn’t line up the armrest with my desk perfectly I also get uncomfortable pain. It’s possible that growing up with computers like I did I found what just worked for me, but I’ve never found the proper form comfortable. I’ve had computer classes up into my adult life.
With a good chair (my Herman) and wrist rest (a wood block) I’ve had 0 pain and work at my computer 8+ hours a day. I never leave my desk with any strain.
Hell almost every engineer I know doesn’t type properly. For me, the real problem is I always tuck a foot under me and sit on it. 😂
Ooooh. Thanks for the explanation!
cant you tell where your fingers are by just looking at what keys appear on your screen?
Back in the typewriter era it will cost you whiteouts every time you do this.
would looking down to see the key cost too much time?
While we’re at it: Fuck those ASUS designers that decided to put those nubbins on W key. Republic of gamers my ass, ⇥a321 you.
Even if they would teach it, people are forgetting so much of what they learned at school.
I can’t forget it. The evil teacher put a box over our hands and keyboard so we couldn’t see our fingers. The typing software made a beep every time we made a mistake and summoned the teacher. The exams where timed and every mistake you made in the final copy (you basically had to copy a paper document) cost you a grade.
I still fuck up sometimes today due to sometimes using keyboards with US, DE or Apple layouts but in general I’m quite fast and never need to look at my hands.
I hated that box. It was red and we’d just slump down in our chairs to look under it.
The thing that really helped my touch typing was playing MUDS: nothing like a textual goblin attacking you to encourage you to quickly type “kill goblin”.
I remember we did it. Though not that strictly. Just some program and eventually got a grade for it based on usually grading system. I would have never passed so strict requirements, well i never have passed so strict requirements anyway.
Our native language teacher had similar strict requirements. I didn’t pass a single exam that year, regardless of how many times i tried or for how long i studied.
So I’m completely with you, screw that type of teachers. Making mistakes is human.
I hated software like this. It caused me to make two errors immediately: knowing I missed the correct key and then immediately back spacing, causing the second error.
I took typing in high school decades ago and it was probably the most useful thing I ever learned there
One of my friends from High School posted that meme about how school didn’t prepare him properly for life, because he doesn’t know how to do taxes, but at least he knows that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell.
I had to comment: “I sat next to you in civics class, where we literally filled out fake tax forms to prepare us for doing taxes.”.
It’s ridiculous.
I had a typing class in early high school on a regular old typewriter. We had computers, but not enough for a whole class to learn typing.
In the early 90s, we had little keyboard trainers with a row of LED lines at the top (like calculator screen) that would be carted into the classroom and we’d do lessons as a class.
We had computers and the typing software made a beep with the PC speaker each time you made a mistake. The beeping summoned the evil teacher to torture you even more, e g. by covering hands and keyboard with a box.
Later in high school when we got computers, someone discovered that if you shuffle your feet on the carpet to build up static then touched the lock (remember when computers came with a set of keys?!) the computer would reset.
“It’s not my fault Miss, the computer has reset! Can you help?”. (This particular teacher was young, attractive, and sometimes didn’t wear a bra).
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Me, haha
sad Mavis Beacon sounds
Why learn typing? Just let the Ai do it! Pfft!
/s
