Hacker News Reader

I’ll give you a use case. People with disabilities who can’t use the keyboard. Ploopy stuff has been absolutely amazing.

View on HN

Does it work better than a trackball (thinking of the Kensington ones) in that respect ?

Depends on the disability. Not a homogenous group. "Work better" for whom?

I’ve provided a lot of different of the balls. Last one was for someone in bed and needed to control the whole pc with his chin. We adapted the base to fit on a mount. Other uses for people with ALS with reduced hand function - altered the ball shape to hold the hand.

Yes. Then I couldn't come up with a case where the trackpoint would work great but not a trackball.

Probably my lack of imagination, the article is about desk setup, and while you can move a trackball with basically anything that has friction, a trackpoint is a lot smaller and finicky. A joystick could be a better version if we're thinking adaptive input.

Use those a lot to (always try and focus off the shelf first). But for cases where we need to position differently we often need something custom

Thanks! About off the shelf but customizable, slightly off topic, but Keychron is producing one of the smaller trackballs with full button mapping management:

https://keychron.co.jp/pages/nape-pro

Anyone wanting one that could fit anywhere on any side of a keyboard could be interested.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com