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swalker

Very helpful member
Joined
Dec 11, 2014
Messages
1,576
Reason
DX MND
Diagnosis
07/2014
Country
US
State
CO
City
Vail
As many of you know I banked my voice with Model Talker. I have the file that was produced installed on my ancient Samsung Galaxy S4 cell phone.

I have been having difficulty using my thumbs to type of the phone's keyboard. As my voice continues to fade, I decided it was time to get serious about setting things up so that I can communicate better.

I can still touch type on a keyboard that has short travel keys, though slowly and with much less accuracy than in the past. So, connecting a real keyboard to my cell phone seemed like a logical direction to go.

I am often out and about for long enough that I need to either be charging my cell phone or using an accessory battery pack plugged into the micro USB charging port.

This prevents me from practically using an On The Go (OTG) cable to connect any peripherals.

Since the phone supports bluetooth, I decided to try a bluetooth keyboard.

I can report that the "Jelly Comb Universal Bluetooth Keyboard Ultra Slim" keyboard I purchased from amazon for $13.99 pairs with my phone easily. The keyboard has a standard size layout, which is good for me. It runs off of 2 AAA batteries, so I don't have to worry about charging it. I can simply carry extra batteries. A pair of batteries is supposedly good for 700 hours of use.

The keyboard is a bit different in feel that the ones I have used for the last 40 years, but is completely adequate. The only criticisms are 1) the nubs marking the home keys are a bit small, 2) because it is not a complete keyboard with the standard 101 key layout, I find myself shifting my hands too far to the left and constantly searching for the home keys, and 3) I have trouble pressing the spacebar with my thumb (I have trouble with that on my regular keyboard, but more so on the Jelly Comb bluetooth keyboard).

I am using the Talk Free app and have found that by judicious use of the tab key I can avoid having to use any kind of pointing device to use the parts of Talk Free that I need. That is a very good thing, because moving my hands from the keyboard to the mouse is a bit problematic. I was planning to upgrade to the paid version, but discovered it is 1 version back from the free version. So, for now, I just put up with the adds that roll across the bottom.

I am ordering a phone holder and plan to mount both that and the keyboard to the power wheelchair's tray table.

So, for less than $30 I will have a pretty good setup that I think will comfortably take me through the next step of progression.

Steve
 
Many phones have settings now for people with disabilities. You might be able to change your settings to help you even more��
 
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