Programming tools for a physically handicapped person

I've a friend who wants to learn web programming. He's a physically handicapped person.开发者_运维技巧 Actually he uses computer with a trackball and he can press keys one by one and only with one hand. So, I think that his greatest problem will be trying to write special characters that require the use of two hands (such as >,!,#, etc.). First I thought in Visual Studio (Intelissense can be a great help) but does anybody know about tools that can make even easier programming?

I know is an odd question but I'll really appreciate if someone could give me a hand here :)

Thanks in advance

Several companies make programmable keyboards, keypads and footswitches that would make for easy access to those characters normally accessed with the shift key. Some are used as supplements to a standard keyboard, others replace the standard keyboard.

They're designed so you can apply your own labels to the keys according to the functions you assign. Some have software that lets you assign multi-step macros to single keys.

Lots of examples of such products here: http://www.fentek-ind.com/program.htm (just the first page I found with Google)

Another feature worth being aware of is Sticky Keys - on Windows, hit SHIFT 5 times in a row fairly rapidly to turn it on. When Sticky Keys is on, modifier keys like SHIFT, CTRL, and ALT 'stick' until the next key is pressed: so if you want to type the ! character, you can do so by pressing SHIFT and then pressing 1, without having to press both at the same time.

(Note that Sticky Keys turns itself off automatically if you do hold down SHIFT and another key at the same time - but you can turn this feature off so that it stays on all the time via the control panel.)

Not sure how useful speech-to-text will be; it tends to be fine-tuned for English words that you'd find in a dictionary, I'm not sure that it would cope very well with either the heavy use of symbols or the use of non-english text found in most languages (eg printf!).

This answer may seem a bit late, but I hope it will be usefull to many:

A very good program to know, allowing one to input with only 2 movement (be it with a mouse, a joystick, a finger, a toe, the head, eyeballs, etc), and which could allow one to type quite fast once used to it : dasher (wikipedia page), that you can find on : dasher official site

It's surprisingly easy to learn and get into : you "aim" for the next letter, and it grows while going toward your pointer. Once you enter it, on the far side you see the next letters appear, with the most probable ones much bigger than the others (ex: "e" is usually the biggest for the first letter, but once in it, "n" will be quite big as it's a probable next letter. When you have crossed through "ente", "r" will be very big and easy/fast to aim. If you "exit" (by going above or below or by going back) the current letter, it deletes it and therefore you can select another one to replace it. See the wikipedia page for a nice animation showing how it's done.

You can have Dasher use (and train on) specialized dictionnaries to have the most useful letters bigger and therefore easier to "type" (usefull if you intend to do programming, for example. By default the dictionnary is to write letters/mails/etc)