FJ Typer — the most accessible touch typing tutor

Assistive Design
Jul 24, 2017 · 3 min read

There’s a school in Adyar, Chennai close to where I live — called St. Louis. It’s a part residential school for the deaf and the blind. I started visiting St. Louis in 2014 and helped some of the students there by recording their lessons, clearing some of their questions in different subjects, teaching them Math etc. Just anything that I could help them with or just hang out and talk to them. It was kind of ad-hoc — I would go on Sundays any time between 9am–12noon and spend some time with them.

Since I planned these visits for the weekend, I would end up skipping them whenever I was traveling or working on the weekend. Also, another problem that there was no fixed “routine” of what I was going to do there. It was pretty ad-hoc. Some days, I would record some lessons for them, other days it would be conversations around my work and my travels.

Around the same time I thought it would be a great idea to spend a stipulated amount of time every week with the students. I planned my visits from 8:30AM –9:15AM twice a week. I started helping the the 12th grade students to get conversant in using computers. Also, these visits would help me understand how the students interact with the world around them and hence find potential problems to solve.

By the second week of my “training” itself, I started observing some of the challenges that the students were facing.

Many of the students were new to computers. They were using a keyboard for the first time. They did not know where the different keys were on the keyboard. In short, they were a bit intimidated by the keyboard.

The usual route to make anyone familiar with the keyboard is –

  1. Constant practice for weeks — or
  2. Use a touch-typing tutoring software/typing classes to learn faster.
  3. And the biggest factor — building familiarity by visually seeing the location of the keys.

However the challenges with the above process

  1. Constraints due to vision impairment — So, they students get no visual reiteration of the location of the keys
  2. Accessibility — No touch-typing tutors are accessible via screenreaders.
  3. Limited flexibility — Settings were limited to font size changes
  4. Audio Feedback — Audio feedback can aid the child with low vision. Currently no touch-typing tutors provides audio feedback.

There is no touch-typing tutoring software that’s accessible to people with visual impairments.

This led me to create some initial hacked up prototypes for the students. Once the students starting using the software that I created, they started telling me

Anna, I want to use that f-j software to practice typing.

Hence, that name stuck.

FJ Typer — The most accessible touch-typing tutor

FJ Typer is a Touch Typing tutor for people who are visually impaired, that -

  1. Is accessible and works with NVDA.
  2. Invites the user to explore the keyboard and familiarize themselves with it using audio feedback.

A simple fix to a vital starting problem.

Click to see a demo of FJ Typer

If you need more information about FJ Typer, feel free to drop me an email at nadu@assistive.design

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