Skills for Access

Description

For people who have reduced manual dexterity due to a tremor, paralysis or other condition, a number of alternatives or extensions to the conventional keyboard and mouse set-up exist, including:

• trackballs;

• joysticks;

• touch screens;

• tablets and pens;

• switching devices.

In most cases, the advantage over a conventional mouse is that the input device is fixed in position, and is more easily gripped and used to control the cursor (or tab focus) on screen.

A number of alternative keyboards also exist, from ergonomic keyboards to keyboards with reduced number of buttons to on-screen keyboards (using an on-screen 'virtual' keyboard of course requires another input device).

Multimedia Incompatibility

Alternative input devices should be able to satisfactorily control online content, including multimedia presentations and software for playing multimedia, so long as the content or software has been developed to be operable using the keyboard. But if certain actions require using the mouse, for example to reveal specific information, or select an item from a list of options, then it's unlikely that it will be possible to perform the action using an alternative input device.

Specific issues with keyboard accessibility, and hence alternative input device accessibility, exist when accessing Flash movies using certain browsers. There are also significant problems in accessing certain media players when they are embedded in a web page.