This is actually not my first time without a mouse. The story began one cold night; I was happily surfing the net and then my pointer jerked a little. Then a lot. Then it died. I looked for all possible cause of death but there was no explanation. I was stuck. Unlike this assignment that gives us the luxury to cheat once in a while if we really cant get to that certain part of the window, I was staring powerlessly at my keyboard and frantically hitting all the combinations possible risking to send the OS berzerk. those were very very painful days. Now that we are studying about the usability of the web I can compare that experience with being handicapped. On the other hand though, what little I learned from that experience proved to be amazingly benefitial. Being able to use certain shortcuts really is a time saver.
Although it probably takes a few milisecond to move your hand from the keyboard to the mouse but it adds up as you go along, plus it's great to look like you know what you are doing.

PS: tabbing through links is a pain

seeing that i've never been handicapped from using my mouse, this experiment was one that i found myself hard to handle. Okay, after class, i came back to my room to do my regular; check my email, log onto facebook, reject a few friend request, and see what homework i had online. I immediately grab my mouse, and after i click on the internet icon, i remember, "I'm not supposed to be using this!!"..so i say ok, lets see how this is going to go. I exit out of the internet, and gaze at my keyboard. "This is CRAZY!!, No Mouse". I look at my keyboard and see that yes, i bought a multimedia keyboard. I press the internet icon on the keyboard, and whalla, the internet is up. So i use the tab button to change the address, and type in webmail.utexas.edu. I used the tab button alot. Okay so i got into my email, and used the arrows as a cursor to go up and down the page. I used the tab button to change emails, but i could never figure out how to erase just one message. I get angry at not being able to delete the spam thats taking up space in my email, so i tab to the url address, and log onto facebook. All i needed was the tab and enter button. I wanted to listen to my iTunes, so i kept trying to figure out how do i minimize this page. After about ten minutes, i press the x button on my keyboard, and it closes the internet, not what i was expecting but it would do. so i used the tab button to open iTunes, and lucky me, my keyboard has a play button, stop button, fast forward, rewind, and a volume up and down button!!! Not having a mouse wasnt that bad, the keyboard just took too much time.

The last two day have been a challenge not being able to use the mouse and having to relay on the keyboard short cuts. You have to have patient especially if you are using the tabs to move from link to link and if you go to fast you miss the link that you want. So got to start all over again and go though all the links to get to the one you want. Not being able to use the mouse to point and click is time consuming because what you can do with a mouse only take a second where using the keyboard takes minutes to accomplish a task weather it be checking email or surfing the net. That can take longer if your computer is slow. When checking my email I wasn't sure how to put a check mark on the mail that I want to trash. I was able to get it highlighted, but couldn't put a check mark on the box. How would you put a X or check mark on a box? Some of the other thing I did when I was mouse less was listening to music. I not sure about how would you adjust the volume using the keyboard? Can you move the volume bar using the keyboard. Yeah, some keyboard having a volume key,but what if you don't have that. I gave up after awhile and I decide just to use my headphone. I think it would be hell if everyone in the world had to go mouse less. People would go crazy and the majority of people wouldn't know the short keys on their keyboard. I know I would be one of those people.

My two days without a mouse was closer to a few hours without a mouse, which were at work on Tuesday afternoon and Thursday morning. Due to extenuating circumstances, I was away from a computer all day on Wednesday. However, I am not anxious to extend the assignment for another day. I found it so frustrating to navigate some of my favorite websites that I gave up surfing and did real work instead. I was able to check my Gmail and Hotmail email accounts, but I never did figure out how to navigate to the links within the emails. I suspect that this would be less of a problem if I had my accounts configured to view text-only email, not HTML. I found it interesting that when my use of the mouse was limited, I preferred websites that required scrolling. It was easier for me to page up and down while scanning and reading content on one page than to navigate links between a lot of pages. I had the easiest time offline, using Windows and MS Office applications, because I use those keyboard shortcuts more often. However, quite often the keyboard shortcuts were inadequate if I was trying to do more than one thing at once, such as answering the phone and looking up a file. And if I needed to pull up a file quickly, using the keyboard short-cuts weren’t an option at all.

Being a computer scientist, completing my tasks using only the keyboard was rather simple. I often prefer to use keyboard shortcuts rather than the mouse because it is usually faster. Whenever I navigate through my local folders and files, I almost never use the mouse. I do everything with the keyboard and shortcuts. Some things however are very annoying when you don’t have a mouse. One of these things is surfing the web. It’s not difficult by any means. One can type Alt-D to select the web address in the address bar and then type to change the URL and hit Enter. Then one can simply tab to choose between links and hit enter when u reach the desired link. If one wants to scroll down on a page simply use the down button or page down button to do this. To open a new tab (in Mozilla Firefox at least) simply type Ctrl-t. There is no real problem I encountered using just the keyboard. I simply alt-tab to switch between windows/programs and I am able to do any desired task. To access the toolbar that has file, edit, view, etc. buttons, one can hold down the alt button and press the character that is underlined in the desired section. For example, alt-F is the shortcut to access the file section. If a site has many links it is very annoying to tab until you reach the right link. It is not hard to do any of this, but very inconvenient and downright annoying. One example of the annoyance is when I tried using my media player to play music or create new play lists. It was very inefficient to use the keyboard and it required me learning many keyboard shortcuts to even do all of this. So I grew frustrated and searched for an alternate solution to using these shortcuts.
Without much difficulty, I have found a loophole in this assignment! According to the instructions, we are not allowed to use a mouse for these two days. However, it does not specify that we cannot emulate a mouse using our keyboard and thus be able to move the curser and left-click on anything we want using only the keyboard. Now one can accomplish this emulation by either writing their own code to emulate the mouse or one could simply use the built-in mouse emulation that comes with windows XP. To enable this simply go to control panel, click on “Accessibility Options,” click on the “mouse” tab, select “Use MouseKeys,” and hit apply. Now ensure that num lock is on and use the following buttons to control the cursor: 8 to go up, 2 to go down, 4 to go left, 6 to go right, and 5 to left click. One can also use 1, 3, 7, and 9 as the diagonals for cursor movement. Now not using a mouse is trivial since I can use my keyboard to control the mouse cursor and thus I am no longer inconvenienced by not being able to use my mouse.
This assignment did not make me change my idea of computer use, but I do have a greater appreciation for the duality of using both the mouse and keyboard, rather than just one or the other.

Well this made for a challenging two days. The programs that I know well (ie photoshop and such) were fine since most people use key shortcuts all the time. It was the other computer activities that got to me...trying to navigate through a website drove me insane. Of course the fact that my computer is the slowest thing EVER it was even more annoying. I seem to learn shortcuts pretty fast. Once you start doing them over and over again they become second nature. Because of this I believe it wouldn't be as bad if I sat down and learned all of them. I definatly have much more apriciation for the mouse...who knew that a little pad on my computer would be the gateway to my internet life...

Spending these last two days without a mouse has been really interesting. Even though I know a lot of basic keyboard shortcuts, there were still things that were very frustrating for me to do. For example, getting to a link on a page was a huge hassle and waste of time. I tended to get a little to impatient trying to get down to the bottom and ended up passing it up. I finally got fed up with it and went to find the shortcut to back-tab to a link. Also, I couldn’t get to some links as the tabs would skip over them. Using only a keyboard is definiately doable for everyday things, like checking my email or chatting on aim. Even surfing the web, which was a little bit more complicated, was doable after the first couple of minutes of frustration. I did, however, have to give up my random game playing because I couldn’t find a way to play them without a mouse and playing around in Photoshop was pretty much out of the question. I did learn a couple of really handy shortcuts though. For instance, I finally figured out how to switch between tabs in Mozilla (shift + tab), how to close a tab (ctrl + w), and how to highlight the URL box (alt + d).
Overall, I think this was a really good learning experience. Its good to know shortcuts as they do make some commands faster, like formatting in word or tabbing and switching between windows. But a mouse definitely makes life easier for things like games and surfing. Basically having only a keyboard or only a mouse is pretty frustrating (and pretty much impossible with only a mouse), but when you’ve got both tools and know how to use them to their full extent, life just becomes so much easier.

I'm not going to lie. I didn't last the whole two days. I ended up cheating and I think anyone who says differently is, well, I shouldn't project my inadequacies onto other people. Anyways:

Using a computer with a keyboard only is a hard thing to do. And to perform all of the functions that I needed to do, a keyboard alone was inadequate. Actually, inadequate is an understatement. The current way user interfaces are structured, a keyboard alone is a horrendous failure.

Opening, closing, and switching tabs in Firefox was almost impossible to figure out efficiently, which significanty affects my browsing behavior (on average, I've got more than five tabs open at the same time). Not to add the horror of navigating though linked websites. Ever tried tabbing through an entire Wikipedia article? It takes forever. Switching windows was annoying (alt-tabbing everywhere). Gaming was impossible, to put it bluntly. Well, I take that back - I play emulated SNES and NES games often, and those require the use of a keyboard only - but someone who can't use a mouse is probably not going to be able to press a multitude of keys in rapid succession either.

One thing that I NEVER figured out how to do was activate the icons in the tray of the start bar - those next to the clock. Many programs I use minimize to this tray, and you MUST click them in order to restore them to the desktop.

It was a painful process. Furthermore, I realized that someone who did not have the motor skills to use a mouse could also not manipulate the keyboard as fast/well as I could, which would only add to the frustration.

Things were slower, more complicated, and more frustrating. Also, the mouse is like second nature to me; I would whip out my laptop and automatically use the touchpad while holding it with the other hand before I caught myself. I've learned to use keyboard shortcuts and mouse shortcuts in a synergetic fashion so that the interface works for me. This is the way the designers made it, and I try and utilize it to its maximum efficiency. I'm not a very patient person with computers, and being below 100% was frustrating.

However, I know that a computer CAN be run on a keyboard alone - I've done it several times. I've had to live without a window manager and only used a command line shell to do everything I needed to do (lynx for web, vi for text, and so forth). That sort of asceticism isn't desirable in the world that we live in anymore. I've got places to go, people to e-mail. Time is important - I need to get a map to a building NOW because I'm supposed to be there in 10 minutes and it is 15 minutes away. Are the fancy UI's a crutch or a ladder? Am I just asking questions because it is 1:30am and I drank too much caffeine?

You'd think that since I'm around people who use JAWS all the time everyday that I'd be able to pick up a few skills. Wrong. Since I work at the Accessibility Institute, I decided to test my knowledge of JAWS on some Web sites that I'm reviewing. I turned off my screen, perused through the site using only a keyboard, trying to look for an embedded audio file, which was probably 2 to 3 layers deep. It took me around 20 minutes just to access the URL address bar without a mouse! Unbelievable!

After about an hour of using only a keyboard to navigate through sites, I eventually got frustrated and decided to stop. I tried it again when I got home to read through my e-mails using the trial JAWS version, but I eventually had to turn on the screen because I felt like pulling my hair out for not being more efficient with JAWS. After turning on the screen, tasks were able to be completed more quickly with just keyboard access.

Before I begin, I have a confession to make. I had a little bit of an edge on this task, and I’ll tell you why. For almost a year, I lived with a completely worthless mouse. It was part of a package deal w/ a free, hand-me-down computer. How could I turn it down? My desk was too small to move the mouse around on, the darn thing was constantly jamming, and it never, ever, really worked right. Did I do something logical and buy a new mouse for $10? Of course not! I struggled and struggled and then finally set out to learn keyboard shortcuts to make my life easier. Well, I learned a lot of shortcuts and used them pretty frequently. It was either that, or throwing my mouse through my window. And since I couldn’t afford a $10 mouse, I sure the hell couldn’t afford a new window.

Well, not too long after becoming fairly proficient at using keyboard shortcuts, my boyfriend surprised me with a spanking new, sleek optical mouse that works like a charm. Did I keep up my nifty habit of using keyboard shortcuts? Why, no, why would I bother using a completely time saving skill when I had this great new piece of technology that I could without a doubt rely on any time my brain wanted to shut off?

That said, when I started this task, it was a little like driving a standard after using an automatic car for a few months. Things were rusty at first. I had to open a new window and search on Google for a website that listed more shortcuts than the classroom handout to refresh my memory. Overall, I felt pretty comfortable again after about 30 minutes. Just like getting back on a bicycle. One place I did run into problems was when I tried to update my observations on the SSH from my home computer. This was very hard because I could not figure out how to access the class folder from the menu. After about 30 minutes of trying to figure out what to do, I gave up and cheated. Sorry, but I have other homework too!

Could I live without a mouse if I had to? Yes, definitely. However, I also feel the mouse is a great accessory to a computer and that having one that works properly is quite nice. Being someone who’s owned a broken mouse on its last rollerball, I can understand the frustration others might feel if they either cannot use, or do not have a properly working mouse. Having a mouse just makes things a little more convenient.

To put it bluntly, it sucked. I am so used to having a mouse and using quick navigation, so it was hard for me to adjust to the keyboard. The hardest part was getting used to the keyboard shortcuts. I kept having to look down at my help sheet to remind me what the shortcuts did. Another problem I had was when I accidentally pressed a wrong key and all of sudden popped up something different other than the internet browser.
In dealing with websites, I noticed how important it is to label all images and links correctly and without numbers. They should be informative and to the point. Some sites have repeated links on every page, and it definitely got obnoxious having to listen to all of the menus just to get to the real content of the page. The form function was incredibly useful and I appreciated Jaws telling me what to do (instruction wise) with chosing through menus.

Practice would definitely make this program seem useful, but in the beginning it is frustrating and takes a load of work. I can see now, how much I use the mouse (and my eyes...) and how to build a website the would be easy to use.

Two days without a mouse!? I cannot even imagine going back to life before having an optical mouse with a scroll button on it. This was a trying exercise but worthwhile, as I wanted to learn some more shortcut keys. Knowing my way around the keyboard a little better will help relieve some of the stress in my wrists and hands from using the mouse for extended periods of time (I’ve already tried to compensate by using the mouse with both my right and left hand). I have my computer set up to where I can switch between English and Hebrew when I am typing by pressing the ALT+SHIFT buttons, so when I was practicing the shortcuts while navigating and searching online, I found myself typing in Hebrew every now and then. I have a couple toolbars installed on my web browser, and I found that the TAB key will take me through the form boxes like search bars but it will not allow me to select my quick buttons. I also like to listen to and rate music on Launchcast, but I could not figure out how to rate the music without my lucky mouse. I managed to access Trillian and select a buddy to IM using the shortcut keys, but I could not do much else, navigation wise, with the shortcut keys within Trillian. On some web pages it was difficult to see which link was selected by pressing the TAB button, so I got lost on the page a few times. Maybe someone has already done this, but perhaps, someone could invent a web browser for people with disabilities, similar to Firefox being an improvement on IE.

Shortcut keys alone = eh
Mouse alone = ok
Shortcut keys in cohorts with a mouse = very cool.

This was certainly an interesting assignment. While I happen to know PC shortcuts very well, my primary computer these days is my Apple iBook G4. About the only thing I use my PC these days for is Dreamweaver and Flash, whose PC versions are far and above better than their Mac counterparts. So with that I'll start with my impressions with the PC side. From the initial startup, it is very clear to me that Windows was designed to be far more accesible than Mac OS X. All keyboards post-Windows 3.1 have a built in Windows/Start button. That button launches the familar start menu, which the user can then select what ever program they want. This is much more difficult on the Mac. The Apple button does not launch any kind of "Apple menu." In fact it does nothing when pressed alone. Now back to the PC side, I was able to easily find Macromedia Dreamweaver in the "All Programs" menu. Once in Dreamweaver things were a little more complicated as I had to navigate through the forms to get to the code section, so that I could edit HTML. But after that it was pretty effortless, since I pretty much use Ctrl-S to save anyways and Ctrl-X to exit. Those commands are the same throughout all the Windows programs I use, and because of that I pretty much have dropped the mouse all together anyways to perform those kind of simple commands. I had very little problems in both Safari on the Mac and Firefox on the PC in navigating website. It took much longer to perform my daily tasks, but I was able to manage. By the end of the day, my left hand was sore from pressing the Tab button so many times, so I can imagine people that must use only keyboards must have really strong left hands built up from all of that tab button pushing. Onto the Mac, I had major problems figuring out how to use the OS until I was able to find the "Universal Access" menu in the System Preferences. From there I was able to turn on a really neat feature where you can use the arrow keys to control the mouse pointer. I found that to be an extremely useful feature although the fact that I really had to dig to find it made it a definite setback for me. Even though once I figured out how to do that, it made using OS X a breeze, I still think most people would be extremely frustrated by the fact that this is buried, and would give up on technology altogether.

My time on the computer without a mouse was not as bad as I imagined. I figured out the shortcuts on the handout as well as others from the pull down menus. It takes a little longer to do some things, and I couldn't figure out how to highlight text (my password for this forum for example) so I had to switch back and forth between windows to enter a password I didn't know. But everything seems possible without a mouse.

I checked all my emails with few problems. Once I figured out how to scroll backwards (shift + tab) I didn't worry about passing up a link or form box. This allowed me to zoom through pages quickly. As stated earlier, I found switching between windows on the computer just as easy as using a mouse. I am completing this assignment with no mouse.

Using the keyboard as the only navigational tool for the computer taught me new things. For one, I am extremely reliant on the mouse, but these keyboard shortcuts are good to know and easy to use.

I thought not using my mouse/touchpad was going to be pretty easy, but I have changed my mind. I work on my laptop a lot, so I have learned some of the keyboard shortcuts because they are easier than the touchpad. However, there were some tasks I was unable to do, and I still haven’t figured out the proper commands for everything. I looked up mac keyboard shortcuts, without using my touchpad, and I did learn quite a few more than I already knew, but I couldn’t figure out some of the prompts. For example, the apple page with the shortcuts states that the command key switches between windows within an application, where applicable, but it didn’t work when I tried to use it to switch between browser windows. This experience has changed my idea that computers are easy to use for anyone with common sense; people that have disabilities preventing them from using a mouse definitely face more of a challenge to use computers to their full capacity. Not having access to the mouse is much more time consuming and can be a bit frustrating when you are not familiar with all the shortcuts. I have to say that I am really grateful to have the technology of the mouse/touchpad and that I am able to utilize it.

Life with out a mouse is not too tough. It would have been harder a year or two ago because I have started to rely less on my mouse recently because it is quicker to do some things. For example, switching from open applications using the Alt and Tab keys, or if someone is filling out a form, it is quicker to switch from box to box using the tab key rather then clicking in each individual box. Some problems arise when I wanted to get to a link at the bottom of a page that is full of other links, so I would have to hold the Tab key down. I messed around on Internet Explorer and used AIM to talk to my friends. Most things were not hard to do, but I had to use the sheet we got in class to figure out how do some things. For example, if I passed a link I was trying to get to, instead of going all the way around holding the Tab key, I learned to just hold the Shift key and then hit the Tab key. It was also kind of fun using the key board to get places, not so boring to surf the web. It was slower to get places in the long run, but having both a mouse and using the key board as quick links to places makes searching the web much quicker and efficient.

What I learned these past two days was that not having a mouse takes a while to get used to. It wasn’t as difficult as I had once thought it would be because of the keyboard shortcuts that are available and because of the fact that I’ve done it before. My main activities on the computer are using the Internet, listening to my music player, and typing in Microsoft Word. The tab and alt keys came in handy as well as the other basic shortcuts keys. What made it less difficult was that I remembered the URL addresses of the some of the websites that I regularly visited and the fact that I have a lot of bookmarks with important sites that I need such as: Blackboard, UT web mail, and course websites.
More than once, I would get stuck trying to do something. For instance, when I was typing a document, I wanted to paste information from another document. This might have been a little bit more time consuming without a mouse, but I was able to do it using the select all, copy, and paste shortcuts available to Windows. I know that I could have also used the alt key to select the options from the file menu, but it is much more efficient to use the shortcuts. One task that I was not able to do was print out a specific selection from online. I don’t think it’s possible to select a specific group of words or image; the only options I found were to select all content or to just print everything. This was one task that I could not perform using the shortcuts. I have become a little comfortable using the shortcuts whenever I am on the Internet because I have gotten used to not always having a mouse. My mouse is wireless and the downside is that the batteries drain pretty quickly. But, this has allowed me to get comfortable using the computer without a mouse.

Not too bad, but can take quite long. Without using a mouse (after having to disconnect it) I checked my email, wrote my observations, did some AIM, eBay, and also a tiny bit of facebooking. It took me a rather long time to get to the specific links that I wanted hitting the tab-key. The most frustrating part about that was when I hit tab an extra time and missed my link. I couldn’t go back (or maybe I don’t know how) so I had to start over. It also took longer to get to certain programs by having to hit the windows key, and going up and down, left and right. I learned that it’s really easy when you have a mouse connected, and the dude who invented the mouse really deserves something good. Other than that I used some commands we learned in class, for example opening a new window, editing the address bar, etc, which made it a little easier. I also searched for some other commands and one that was kind of cool was when you just enter the name of the site without the “www” and the “.com,” and hit “ctrl-enter” and the site would come right up.

I think practice would make it easy for tasks like the ones I undergo on a daily basis, not using a mouse. An exception to that is for when we start to use Photoshop (probably), and also when people play games that require the use of a mouse, such as Half-life. People who use Visio: web designers, architects, electricians, etc… would probably also face problems without a mouse. This is where we come to appreciate the invention of the mouse!