[gui-talk] Still hassling with my laptop keyboard

[Joel Deutsch]

Hi listers,

Okay, please come clean. I know some of us are totally blind and some are 
partial. I'm partial, myself, but I have no central vision thus can't read 
at all with my eyes. Only with Jaws, recorded literature, and so forth. So 
in dealing with this new machine of mine, which I'd hoped would be a handy 
tool, I'm at a loss.

I thought I'd be able to get the hang of the keyboard with some effort. it's 
an Acer with a number key pad so I don't have to learn the Jaws laptop key 
commands.

but still there's no space between the keys and the sections of keys as I'm 
accustomed to on a normal keyboard, and no matter how patiently I sit and 
turn on Jaws Keyboard Help to explore and get the lay of the land, so to 
speak, I just am finding it nearly impossible to operate the machine.

Please bear in mind that I'm a pretty damn good touch typist, plus a Jaws 
user from way back with the current release. Ordinary stuff like that is not 
impeding me. But try as I might, my fingers just can't figure out where keys 
are, except in small, lucky instances and a few keys I happen to have taught 
myself by now. I don't think this is gonna work.

I know I can get a USB keyboard to plug into this laptop, then set the 
computer within earshot and sit back with only the keyboard on my lap. But 
this ain't what I'd daydreamed about. I guess I didn't anticipate 
realistically how tough this would be to do blind.

Please just tell the truth, guys. I think a number of you are using laptops, 
at least as your secondary computers. How many of you actually use your 
laptops (mine's an Acer PC, for what that matters) normally, and how many 
use an auxiliary keyboard? Am I in a very low-skill class, sort of, if I 
can't figure out how to type on something like this the way sighted people 
do with their own laptops?

Ug. Bummed out. thanks for any helpful feedback.
and Happy New Year.

Joel