I tried going the route of having someone type for me. It would cost me, by the time agency fees are factored in, around $100-$200 per day. If I'm billing, I can afford that. If I'm not billing, I can't and that puts me right back in the place of looking for a solution. Unfortunately, even at the best of times, it was a very tough experience. The typist could not type fast enough to keep up with what I was saying. I would try to teach her macros (stored in her head) and I would say things about constructing loops and method references etc., she would freeze up, think for little bit, and then start again. I would correct what she just typed and then we would keep going. Effectively what I was doing was teaching her to program. then I would have to pay her more money and she wouldn't want to type for me. She would want to write her own code. Get another typist... As you can see, the agency fees would add up and nearly get really expensive if I expected the typist to hang around until two o'clock in the morning so I could finish some work. The same money could be applied to developing these tools if the money was free to be used in this way. That's the second problem with being disabled. Before disability, you're making enough money to build the tools, after disability, you don't have enough money to build the tools and you don't have the physical ability to build the tools. This stuff is not simple. It is complex and you need a team of people and guinea pigs to make something work right. Hell, right now I would be happy if I could get someone to make vr-mode work

http://download.microsoft.com/documents/uk/hardware/Ergonomics_and_Repetitive_Strain_Injury.pdf http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Repetitive+strain+injuries+stretch+higher-a018341055 http://www.rsi-therapy.com/statistics.htm I think the UK stats are probably the best stats to go by. Most of the RSI injury rate information in the United States is based on the last clean census of injuries which was roughly 1994-1995. Unfortunately, since that time states with a large chicken processing workforce, have either stopped counting RSI statistics or have merge them into some other heading making difficult if not impossible to track down what the actual injury rates are. It's amazing the kind of government service you can purchase if your name is Tyson or Perdue. I know this sounds kind of conspiratorial but, up here in New England, the same thing happened with glass cutters and textile workers. Remember, programmers are nothing more than a clean form of blue-collar labor that can be replaced by cheaper labor in a heartbeat. As for the near 100% comment, well as we age, we lose ability. Since everybody ages, is a good chance you will spend decades being unable to use the tools and toys you use today. There's a better chance that the twentysomethings 30 years from now will be inventing all of these cool things that you will be excluded from.

It was intended as a serious, albeit in your face, question. what I was hoping for was a serious answer. I don't expect you to drop anything

Let me introduce you to a term "TAB" Temporarily Able Bodied. It was created in recognition that physical ability is temporary, disability is the norm. I'm disabled because my hands don't work right. I'm also disabled because I need glasses. Minority or majority doesn't matter. My question was trying to provoke thought about what's going to happen to you when you become disabled. age-related ailments will steal your ability from you. But also do you want to leave the future to be a radical shift in career because your hands don't work or a shift in how you work?

As to the direction on what makes something accessible, there is a good 30 years worth of research on the subject in the library if people would only look. Is honestly simple concept of separation of functionality from presentation. If I need a word processor with a speech user interface, then I should be able to purchase a word processor and then purchase a user interface that does what I need. If a blind person needs a text-to-speech interface, then they should be able to purchase their own user interface. None of us should have to rely on adaptations or, as I like to call them, "brutal hacks" on the application.

Every two or three years we do hear about and disabilities. There was Nintendo thumb and now Blackberry thumb and other hand disorders from playing too many first-person shooter games. It's all right in front of us. we also have the issue of elderly, as you point out. I'm not worried as much about the elderly of today but, what happens when you hit 60 and you gradually discover you can't do anything. No texting, no video messages, no anything. Think about that future.

Also think about the implications of what our mobile devices are doing today. I've seen people advocate getting rid of voicemail because you can just send someone a text message. Or the only telephone you can use if you are blind is something that just makes calls and receives calls. These choices exclude people from the mainstream culture. If you are blind and cannot send a text message, you lose social connection. If you can't send a text message, you lose the ability to give someone a time delayed message the way of voicemail works. I do admit that it may be cheaper to warehouse disabled people but, it would be nice if we made a conscious decision.

And as a side note, I was not able to interleave my comments with your text because HTML is not friendly to the disabled.

try instead, each person has their own UI device and that device talks to all other devices like phones, atm's, gas pumps etc. you want multi touch, buy a multi touch display brick. want text to speech, get a tts brick. own your own ui.

what you describe is what we are doing today. looking at it from the IT viewpoint, if you assume each IT person contributes 50k value to the economy and you loose 50k people each year, that is 2.5 mil flushed. 10% of that would make it possible to solve the programming by voice problem in 2-3 years. rather cheap way to stem a multimillion resource loss. almost as cheap as telling the disabled to go sit on a street corner somewhere.

http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Repetitive+strain+injuries+stretch+higher-a018341055 when you work through the reports, the 300k number works out to about 100k for IT. while this report is old, nothing has changed to drop the rate. uk reports are more current http://download.microsoft.com/documents/uk/hardwar/Ergonomics_and_Repetitive_Strain_Injury.pdf As for the near 100%, think arthritis, medication induced tremors, loss of flexibility as you age normally or via trauma. It all adds up to loss of hand function.