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Mouse options for accessibility

1 points by tracker1 ↗ HN
My grandmother is getting to a point where using a computer is becoming very difficult. Her hand tends to shake, and using a mouse or trackpad in particular doesn't seem to work very well. She currently has Ubuntu on her desktop, and a chromebook as well.

Does anyone have any input suggestions for mouse replacements? It's funny, but I think an old-school arcade style joystick moving the mouse slowly with a few buttons would do the trick, but am having trouble finding an out of the box solution for this. Does anyone have any suggestions? I know it should be possible to use a custom input controller for an actual arcade style joystick (8-way). However, an existing solution would be preferred.

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PointerReaper
The most frugal approach might be to consider a trackball, followed by a full computer drawing table (e.g., http://goo.gl/qlHnlz or equivalent). Depends on the nature of her tremor or shake. Alternatively, get her a gaming mouse and turn the dpi sensitivity all the way up such that any movement is translated into minute screen movements.

There are dedicated hardware vendors, found on rehab sites such as http://www.rehabmart.com/product/adapted-wireless-computer-m... that you might consider browsing. I had a link to a product that seems to have gone out of business - it was an adapter that autoaveraged input coordinates to tone down tremors.

Finally, keeping all the keyboard shortcuts handy - http://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/45 or https://support.google.com/chromebook/answer/183101?hl=en might help her.

Best of luck!