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Doorway Text Type is a touch typing tutor is designed for visually impaired people. One of the priorities was to make it as clear as possible.

It can be used by anyone wanting to learn to touch type.

There are some basic rules;

• Get into a comfortable position. with the keybaord placed centrally
• Locate the home keys. F and J have ridges on them to help you find them
• Do not look at your hands. All the information you need is on the screen. The letter to be pressed, the finger to use.
• Do not hurry. There is no advantage in going fast. It is acuracy that matters.
• Type at a steady rate. Do not speed up for the easy bits and slow down for the tricky parts. Try to type to a slow even beat.
• You need to score 94% on an exercise twice before going on to the next one. If you go on without mastering the previous one, it will just be too hard.
• At the start, do not try to to type too much. A single exercise at one session is enough. Use it on a ‘little and often’ basis.
• Do not look at your hands. If you look at your hands, you are practising a different skill. You will always need to look at your hands.

Touch typing is a motor habit like riding abike. Once you have learnt it you can use it any time again in your life.

It has been shown that computer users who are forced to use just one hand can reach a very high rate of entry if;

• they use a method that has been specifically designed to give them an efficient method to move about the keyboard easily
• they start early in life and have not started hunting ang pecking, finding their own way.
• they practise on a little and often basis.

Which is the best OCR software in the world. Which is the most annoying to install on a stand-alone system? The same one, I think.

OCR Software is pretty essential when you are creating accessibile texts for user with disabilities; visually impaired, motor impaired, dyslexic. There will be a document, probably prepared using a computer but the original file has been lost. OCR can help you reconstitute the document.

Four years ago iansys.com were very helpful in doing a comparative review of OCR software available at the time. It was fascinating. It emerged that Abby Fine reader was the best available. However, none of the packages did everything they said they could. The developers ticked their own boxes.  In a particular all the packages failed to recognise correctly texts in European languages which use accents or non standard characters; ß, Ñ, François etc.

Abbyy Fine reader got this right in version 8 and I have stuck with them since. I’d be interested in anyone else’s recent experiences. Is Abbyy in fact still the best?

However, if you want to install it in a stand alone system, be prepared to waste a lot of time. There are on line forms and you can send an email to a server, but these do not work. Only sending  an email to European support brought a helpful answer from a Norwegian support person. You can also run up phone charges to Holland on a support call. As I recall, they speak pretty good English on that helpline too.

The next problem is that you are sent an activation code with 78 characters. Yes, 78. Here is an example of what it might look like! Is this really necessary?

697973-930566-558156-627071-318120-962720-622555-687533-155011-784308-108480-936009-983444