Hello and welcome to this video which is brought to you by the Visual Impairment Team in Devon.
In this video, I demonstrate TouchPad Pal, a free and tiny download that disables your touchpad on your laptop when you start to type, therefore stopping your cursor from straying all over the screen when you don't want it to.
The video includes a full set of subtitles but if you prefer to read from a transcript, please find one below.
Start of Video Transcript
Hello everyone and welcome to this video. In this video I want to demonstrate how to download and install a tiny piece of software called Touchpad Pal, it works on windows machines only.
I have recently made another video in which I demonstrated another piece of free software called Touchpad Blocker and Touchpad Pal does the same thing.
It stops the touchpad on your laptop from working when you are typing. Now, this hopefully, solves the age-old problem of the cursor suddenly moving to a different position on the page when we are trying to type.
Now this is annoying enough if you can see the screen and you can see what’s happened but it becomes much more annoying if you have visual impairments and you can’t see what is happening because it takes those people even more time to recognize that the cursor has moved to a different point on the page and it takes them more time to get the cursor back to where it was previously.
Like anything to do with computers there are many different ways to do the same thing. Some laptops have keys on the keyboard that are made for you to switch the touchpad on and on other laptop you can adjust software settings to disable the touchpad.
Touchpad Pal works in the background and it disable itself after a key on the keyboard is pressed. After you've downloaded it, it puts a shortcut on the desktop. Now importantly, the software seems safe. Since I have downloaded it, nothing horrible has happened to my machine. I am not getting any pop-ups. I am not going to mysterious pages of my web page and so it seems nice and safe.
Okay, so let's have a go at downloading it and let us see if it works, so you can see here this is the address I am at in order to download Touchpad Pal.
Now, again this a complicated page don't be confused by all the adverts and stuff you just want this download, this green download button at the top, so you just click on that and then it takes you to another page, that says download 1 and there we go, it’s already downloaded itself. So once it's downloaded just tell it to run itself and then you will go through this set up guide again we are just going to click next or install or I agree and there it goes.
Then we just click finished. We want it to run itself and you can see once you have installed it, you have a shortcut here and you also have a little icon on your notification bar down there as well.
I am going to test it out. Now the interesting thing is Touchpad Blocker had a whole range range of auctions that you control, Touchpad Pal doesn’t.
If I right click on it and ask it to open itself, if we go down to here, if we go down to the icon in the notifications and click on settings, its then going to try and take you to another webpage where they are try and sell you some software, so don't worry about that, don’t worry about that fact that you can't control it, it just works.
So let's test it out, so hopefully it just works. So let’s go to another webpage and what I am going to do, is here I am using my touchpad obviously, and I am also typing but then with my left hand I am just going to hit a on the keyboard and with my right hand I am going to try to move the cursor with the touchpad and if the software works as it is typing letters in, the cursor will stop moving. So here we go. So i am trying to move the cursor and you can see that it's frozen and then as soon as I stop typing anything in I can move the cursor around the screen again.
So it just seems to work, as usual if you have any comments or experiences of downloading or using this piece of software or any questions, leave them in the comment section down below.
Thank you for watching!
End of Video Transcript
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