Left-handed Dvorak Keyboard (AREV Specific)
At 12 JUN 2007 12:27:33PM Victor Engel wrote:
We have a user who has the use of only her left hand. She uses a left-handed Dvorak keyboard for most of her work, but there have been problems reported in Arev. I think she's using an XP machine with two keyboards attached – a standard one being used for Arev.
I don't really know the details of the kinds of problems that she's running into – I'm not working directly with her.
Have any of you run into issues with other keyboards and have some suggestions of things to try? How low level is the keyboard polling that Arev does?
At 12 JUN 2007 02:51PM Karen Oland wrote:
If she has reprogrammed her function keys, many features may be unavailable in AREV. Many can be accessed via the mouse - but that may be an issue for her as well.
We just had a user in OI complain that the F2 key didn't work for her (actually, that "she couldn't enter any data in a field") – seems she has a laptop and has reprogrammed the function keys (who knows to do what) and thus had no F2. She had to relearn to use the mouse for that function (or put in request for IT to reprogram the keyboard).
At 12 JUN 2007 02:58PM Victor Engel wrote:
That's a good thought. Would you agree, though, that unprogrammed (keys left to their defaults), the style of keyboard should not make a difference to the performance of Arev unless there was a keyboard driver bug?
At 14 JUN 2007 03:25PM Karen Oland wrote:
Yes, I'd agree.
But all notebooks I've seen have odd mappings for some keys - press scroll lock or numlock and a number of keys become unavailable. A fair number also have the function keys redefined by default (sometimes in the BIOS itself).
Also, the other programs she has running can interfere - many utilities will let you remap the keys, so will IM programs, remote access software and a number of others.