No Fingered Typing

I have a confession to make. Don’t get too excited. It’s not that. Or that. I never learnt to type. It’s not that either.

When I was doing my Open University course in English Lit and a Diploma in Creative Writing. I know, it is incredible that I am actually qualified to write. Who knew, not me. At risk of highly annoying any OU tutors who may be reading this; as if they would be reading it. They have given up on me years ago. I had better get back to the point. When I was taking my OU degree and diploma, don’t forget that. I was disabled and limited. Not as much as now, but significantly. Here’s an aside for anyone thinking of studying who is disabled. There are grants available to help you get any equipment you need to study. Which meant that when I started to study, they realised I was typing with two fingers and gave me a two fingered key board. I could just leave it at that and there will be loads of people trying to buy two fingered key boards. This is the problem with social media. If something is written here; it must be true. So let me be very clear; I was joking. There are no two fingered keyboards. Unless they sell them in the shop with the striped paint.

I hope that cleared up any confusion. In reality there will still be people who believe that there are two fingered key boards. Nothing I say will convince them otherwise.

I really must keep on topic. So the real thing that the OU disability grant gave me was voice recognition software. At the time that was Dragon Naturally Speaking. It enabled me to write and even use my PC using just my voice. Now you are all thinking, ‘so what, we can do that with Siri, Google and Word uncle Tom Cobbly and all.’ Yes, but this was a few years ago. Before every device chatted to you, morning, noon and night. Before you could say, ‘Siri, take a letter.’ And she would say, ‘what?’ Or you could click on a microphone button in Word and an icon sit pulsing, waiting for you to talk. This was even before you could have an argument with Alexa.

These days, I have Word. With that pulsating microphone button. The one problem I find… stage fright. It’s like you have walked out onto a giant stage. The audience is all staring at you. You walk up to the microphone ready to sing. Everything goes quiet. What do you say? Obviously I burst into song. Sorry, I mean that I start dictating amazing literature. The next War and Peace. Booker Prize here I come.

It is all very confusing. People assume because I blog, that I sit typing away for hours on end. In fact I chat to my PC for short periods at a time. Then it talks back, I tell it to be quiet, we eventually get an amazing blog together. Not this one obviously. All my secrets are now out in the open. I can’t type and I like talking to technology; who knew?

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