Adaptive Keyboards & Writing Technologies for One-Handed Users

After having been involved in an accident, [Kurt Kohlstedt] suffered peripheral neuropathy due to severe damage to his right brachial plexus — the network of nerves that ultimately control the …read more

Jun 15, 2025 - 15:10

Adaptive Keyboards & Writing Technologies for One-Handed Users

After having been involved in an accident, [Kurt Kohlstedt] suffered peripheral neuropathy due to severe damage to his right brachial plexus — the network of nerves that ultimately control the shoulder, arm, and hand. This resulted in numbness and paralysis in his right shoulder and arm, with the prognosis being a partial recovery at best. As a writer, this meant facing the most visceral fear possible of writing long-form content no longer being possible. While searching for solutions, [Kurt] looked at various options, including speech-to-text (STT), before focusing on single-handed keyboard options.

More after the break…

The reason why STT didn’t really work was simple: beyond simple emails and short messages, the voice-driven process just becomes too involved and tedious with editing, rearranging, and deleting of text fragments. [Kurt] couldn’t see himself doing a single-pass narration of an article text or dealing with hours of dictating cursor movements.

One of the first single-hand typing methods he tried is as simple as it’s brilliant: by moving the functional hand a few keys over (e.g. left hand’s index finger on J instead of F), you can access all keys with a single hand. This causes a lot more stress on the good hand, though. Thus, for a long-term solution, something else would be needed.

Thanks to his state loan program (MNStar), [Kurt] was able to try out Maltron’s ‘Key Bowl’, the TIPY ‘Big Fan’, and the Matias Half-QWERTY keyboard, which describes pretty much what they look like. Of these, the Maltron was functional but very clunky, the TIPY required learning a whole new keyboard layout, something which [Kurt] struggled with. Despite its mere 22 keys, the Matias half-QWERTY offered the most straightforward transition from using a full keyboard.

It was the Matias keyboard that worked the best for [Kurt], as it allowed him to use both his left hand normally, along with adapting the muscle memory of his right hand to the left one. Although [Kurt] didn’t select the Matias in the end, it did inspire him to choose the fourth option: using a custom keymap on his full-sized QWERTY keyboard. In the remaining two parts in this series, Kurt] takes us through the design of this keymap along with how others can set it up and use it.

Our own [Bil Herd] found himself on a similar quest after losing a finger to a ladder accident.

Thanks to [J. Peterson] for the tip.