I read most of the comments with interest (having stepped in late). 'Layabout' first asked why geeks don't do more to help fellow geeks navigate around regular computers, when their limbs don't cooperate. It is really annoying when a sprained finger could mean no texting, or no email, for a week or more - imagine how it is when one has no fingers to begin with, or they don't respond the way the brain thinks they should.

Actually, some of the really good software written to solve some 'disability' issues is, in fact, created by people who know what it is to live in a world designed for other people - emacspeak, JAWS, and so on.

Still, it is the simple things that are really confounding. We have found, serendipitously or however, that gadgets like joysticks make cheap and workable substitutes for 'traditional' WIMP solutions like the mouse, and its fiddly little fingerswitches and scroll button add-ons (that look so cool till you notice they are really useless for someone whose fingers don't work so well).

It would be really great if more folk, who have responded so deeply from their hearts to Layabout's questions, could step around and look at SKID, a Ruby approach to addressing such issues. Most of the code at SKID is written by students, who use this platform to use their imaginations in ways that regular code exercises do not excite, because these address real world problems, helping more people to freely and inexpensively use computers, when their limbs and sensory functions don't work the way that computer and peripheral designers think they do. SKID is a place to let your geekination flow - to virtually dump that keyboard, mouse, monitor and all the stuff that sometimes hinders more than it helps.

Our program, eLocutor (download from http://www.holisticit.com/eLocutor/elocutorv3.htm) is a typing assistant for persons with severe motor disabilities. As such, it places no burden on the user in terms of learning to type as such. Functional operations can be run off using the mouse button only. With a little practice, your brother can watch words being created for him, referenced from the inbuilt dictionary. It installs and runs on Windows only. However, it was not designed for persons with learning disabilities either. Frankly, we do not know, nor have we researched, whether it serves a useful purpose here. If your brother takes to it, please do let us know. With very little effort, the dictionary can be modified (and it learns, too) to downsize it (it was set up with 250,000 words, which few people actually use, plus a specialised physics/cosmology section). Doing this will speed up the word retrieval function, of course, though this may not even be a requirement for your brother. Finally, by installing a text-to-speech app like Festival (which others here have suggested too) the screen will read back whatever is typed, which may assist your brother to learn to associate the words on the screen with the spoken word. Hope this is useful to you.