On Saturday, I learned through the bike shop that my friend Gene’s wife, Marcy, had suffered a serious stroke. The next day, a Slashdot article on communicating with hospitalized people was put on their main page, and I sent it to Tim who had been visiting Marcy and their family.
Through the subsequent comments/links to external sites, Tim picked out some comments about Hospitals keeping Magna Doodles to communicate with patients that cannot speak. He picked one up on his way over, and gave it to Marcy, who proceeded to write her name on it. Tim asked if she would like to use his now-retired PowerBook, and she said yes.
I spent a chunk of my afternoon today, looking into modifying the keyboard map so that it could be used with one hand (the left, in this case) in OSX. Not a whole bunch came up.
Finally, I ran across an app named Ukelele, a nice, graphical Mac OS X keyboard layout editor that somehow seemed to evade my venerable Google-Fu.
Anyways, I created a layout named Marcy ( download keylayout here ). Here are the installation/usage instructions, and a diagram of the keymappings. I decided to use Caps Lock as the key switcher. Could have used Shift, but this just seemed easier.
Save Marcy.keylayout to /Library/Keyboard Layouts/ or Library/Keyboard Layouts/ in your home directory if you don’t have write access to /Library.
Logout and log back in.
Go to International in the System Prefs, and enable Marcy. This will automatically show the input (flag) menu in the menu bar – to switch to Marcy, just click on the American Flag (or whatever your default it), and select Marcy. That’s it.
That’s pretty awesome Will!