Ask HN: Options for One-Handed Typing

I've had email discussions about Dasher with people I mentioned like Ada Majorek (Google), also David Ward (Inference, who worked with the late David MacKay), Tom Doellstorff (UC Irvine), Donna Z. Davis (University of Oregon), and I've read several papers about it, and also the open source code on github, to understand how it works. So I took the time to summarize the points in the videos, the email discussions I've had, the papers I read, and source code I reviewed.

https://www.inference.org.uk/djw30/

There are many interesting points and ideas I've tried to gather together and summarize, and I think Dasher is an important, underrated, not widely known piece of work, that can deeply improve many people's lives, which more people should know about.

Not just people with a wide range of disabilities, but fully abled people without free time on their hands who frequently need to input lots of text quickly. That's why accessibility, diversity, equity, and inclusion are so important: they help everyone.

Dasher a wonderful open source project to contribute to, and a solid foundation that needs to be brought up-to-date and re-implement it in terms of modern LLMs, AI assisted IDEs like Cursor, mobile, and VR/AR user interfaces.

I don't have time to do all of that myself, but I hope to save other people time and effort by writing about it, and I hope to inspire students, researchers, software developers, hackers, and therapists who do have the time, interest, friends, loved ones, patients, and customers who could benefit from it.

I'm sorry to hear about your disabilities of poor reading comprehension and trouble parsing text, and I'm envious that you have so much free time and nothing better to do, that you can take time to complain about your impatience with and intolerance of my writing. But it would have been easier, more efficient, and less stressful for you to simply ignore things you're not interested in rather than unconstructively whining with off-topic posts that benefit nobody. Obviously you don't appreciate how lucky you are to be able to type such a useless post so easily. I'm not even asking you to be empathic, or give a shit about anyone but yourself: if you're lucky enough to live long enough, you'll need accessibility tools like Dasher too.

If you'd like to redeem yourself by writing a more useful constructive response to my post, then go right ahead, read my previous posts, watch all the videos, read all the papers and source code yourself, have some email discussions with other people using and working on Dasher, and then try to write a better summary, because your abstract summary above has absolutely no useful information, and isn't relevant to the discussion -- just a waste of your time and everyone else's.

Or you could even take the trivial effort to paste my write-up into ChatGPT and post a summary, but that would be much lower quality and less enlightening than actually watching the videos and reading the articles and source code I cited yourself, but still better and more interesting than your current bitter off-topic "contribution" to the discussion.

If it makes you feel better, I've written every word of this post personally just for you, MyPasswordSucks. No copying or pasting whatsoever (except the email at the end, with updated links to archive.org since my web site is offline, and I reformatted the transcript of Ada's video). Are you satisfied? Is that the attention you crave? Are my syntax and semantics comprehensible to you now? In return, what do you have to contribute to this discussion yourself, besides ...

̀However aaron695's sister comment is so comically wrong and off base that it's not worth vouching for, since it adds nothing to the discussion, and only goes to show what kind of a horrible person they are. It's amusing just how wrong they are, but insulting and offensive to most people, so please set showdead=true if you want to see it. We all know very well by now how Team MAGA sees empathy as a weakness, and has a sick fetish with mocking and abusing people with disabilities.

Trump mocks reporter with disability:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PX9reO3QnUA

>Donald Trump is under fire again, this time for mocking a New York Times reporter that suffers from a chronic condition. CNN's John Berman reports

Here's a low-effort ChatGPT generated TL;DR summary, to satisfy MyPasswordSucks who had trouble reading my other post:

Here’s the straight-up rundown of the Dasher thread:

DonHopkins jumped in to rave about Dasher—calling it a miracle for people who can’t type. He dropped links to videos, papers, GitHub, and even shared his personal emails with Ada Majorek, who uses Dasher because ALS stole her voice and hands. He made it clear he’d dug deep—watched hours of videos, pored over source code, talked to experts. He went all in to explain why Dasher deserves more love: it’s based on solid info theory, it learns your patterns, it’s openly extensible, and it works across languages and platforms—even VR.

Someone named novosel chimed in asking why Don’s comment was downvoted, saying Dasher really is worth knowing. But then MyPasswordSucks blasted it as “barely-parsable copy-paste diarrhea” and declared Dasher awful, claiming the whole thing was off-topic. He sneered at Don’s effort, calling it useless. aaron695 piled on, arguing Dasher isn’t the answer for someone with a short-term injury and criticizing Don’s wall of text even more harshly.

DonHopkins didn’t back down. He defended his post, pointed out how much final work he put in—no copying or pasting. He reminded people Ada had replied personally, highlighting how essential Dasher is for her. He got indignant about people whining instead of appreciating the depth of his write-up. In short, DonHopkins delivered a massive, heartfelt case for Dasher. Critics flamed him for style and focus. The result: a messy, heated debate between someone who’s poured years into accessibility work and anonymous commenters who can’t be bothered to look beyond a giant block of text.