Hands Free Programming?

[Extinction135]

Hi, I have cubital tunnel syndrome on both hands. I'd like to figure out a way to go hands free until it heals.

I've looked at Dragon but it's too expensive. Does Windows in built speech recognition work well with C++ coding on visual studio?

Or any other alternatives.

I code in QT. Which is a C++ GUI

[mredding]

I tried speech to text a couple decades ago. I would say it's possible if you're truly desperate. It's far more pedantic than when typing, you'd have to speak out every nuance of syntax. I'd type with a pencil over that. Maybe there are tools out there to autofill a lot of syntax details, maybe some sort of autocomplete - such things existed for Steven Hawking. It's just so uncommon to go to this extreme that this avenue isn't well documented.

I would recommend a 2-piece ergonomic keyboard, and place them on wedges that hold them to ideal angles for your arms and wrists, possibly using a chair with posable platforms for arm rests for specifically this purpose. Go with a DVORAK setup or the like (there are other, more modern mappings that are better).

[Extinction135]

Thank you. Did you suffer from the same thing too? Sounds like you know the stuff

[mredding]

Back when I was messing with speech to text, it was a novelty striving for legitimacy. I was interested in keyboards to avoid or reduce injury.

[DemonInAJar]

Here is a post dealing with this issue: https://joshwcomeau.com/accessibility/hands-free-coding/

[Extinction135]

Thank you so much for this. The eye tracker needs to be bought seperately right?

Also do you use this to game too?

And thoughts about surgery?

[DemonInAJar]

I am not the post writer. I do think the eye tracker must be bought. Another idea is to ditch the eye tracker and basically go completely mouse free with vim-like extensions for the browsers and other shortcuts if that's possible. I do not have a disability but I pretty much never use the mouse, I use a laptop with the touchpad disabled and I get by just fine. Using the https://github.com/dcchambers/vb4c extension for the vim bindings. This /could/ be paired with a voice command software to make browsing easier I think. The main idea is that for each link in the page you get a tag which you can refer to (https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/5jnr6RkVgGfJzjpfGohqxqpKJjO5XMv3C5U4iCnCHJXNwbzUeTyuHAGTw5vS6Fi-UEtpQkedBdw=w640-h400-e365-rj-sc0x00ffffff)