Hello, this is James from the Visual Impairment Team in Devon.
In this video I am going to be demonstrating Touchpad Blocker, which is a free piece of software for your Windows computer that disables your touchpad on your laptop when you are typing.
In doing this, the software stops your cursor from jumping all over your screen.
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 free and tiny piece of software called Touchpad Blocker.
It works on Windows machines only.
Touchpad Blocker stops the touchpad on your laptop from working when you are typing only.
This hopefully solves an age-old problem of the cursor suddenly moving around the page when you are trying to type.
And you can see on the screen now I am at the website here.
Now this is an annoying enough problem in terms of the cursor moving around the page if you quickly recognize that the cursor has moved because you can see it in a different position on the page but it is a bigger problem and a much bigger nuisance if you have a visual impairment because it would take you longer to realize that the cursor has moved to a different position on the page and then it would take you even longer to get the cursor back to where it was.
Like anything to do with computers, there are many different ways to do the same things. Some laptops have keys on the keyboard that enables you to switch the touchpad on and off and on other laptops you can adjust the software in order to disable the touchpad.
Now, Touchpad Blocker as I said, is a very small download and it just works in the background, it disables itself after any key on the keyboard is pressed.
The software has a shortcut on the desktop which you can just click to turn it on and off.
And then you can turn it on and off with the keyboard shortcuts now.
Importantly, the software seems to be safe since I downloaded a couple of days ago, nothing horrible has happened on my computer.
I haven’t gone to any surprised pages when I have tried to go on the Internet or anything like that.
So it does seems safe to download.
However, just watch out because as you can see from this page. It is an incredibly busy page.
It has got adverts on it , all of which scream at you to download but in my experience you will need to do this download this is black download button up here or this black download button down here, sorry.
So I will only be using this black download here. So it is of very small software download so you can see it's done it in a fraction of a second.
So let's open it up and then it takes us through a set of wizard and again, we just, like most pieces of software click next or I agree. Now it's asking if we want to run Touchpad Blocker at the moment which we do, we don’t necessarily want to report the installation to the website so here we go let’s have a look.
Right you can see here this is the desktop shortcut formally Touchpad Blocker and this is control panel of the software itself, so these are our options on it, we can automatically run the programme on start up, we can show system tray notifications, which is these notifications down here.
There we are there with Touch Blocker.
We can block accidental tabs and clicks and make sure all of those I would suggest are ticked or checked.
Now this time interval to block clicks, this is after you press a key on your keyboard.
How quickly afterwards does this software disable your touchpad and you have got a choice here. I would suggest you kind of go for quickly as possible. It is also also blocking our wheel and move events if your touchpad has facilities like that and it will bleep when a click is blocked.
It is important to say that of course as well as the touchpad beneath most touchpads are the left and right mouse buttons and it will block the use of those while you are writing as well and it will also bleep to let you know that you have accidentally press the left or right mouse button and here’s our keyboard shortcut by pressing control and F9. We can turn it off as we can see from notification or we can turn it back on.
So I am going to do a quick demonstration here of Touchpad Blocker. Now at the moment to move my mouse around I am using my touchpad. What i am going to do, I am going to go into the address bar up here and with my left hand I am just going to do iI am just going to start pressing different keys to activate the writing and then with my right hand I am going to be moving my mouse cursor around randomly as you can see. So let us see what happens.
Okay so you see I repeatedly pressed the letter “a” as I was pressing that then movement from the touchpad actually froze and then as soon as I stopped, I got the movement back again.
So there we go everyone, that is a really, really useful piece of software.
When we go touchpad on our laptop and when we are trying to write whether it be on the Internet or in Microsoft Word or anything like that.
As usual, any comments about this video, any comments about the software. Please leave your comments in the space below the video.
End of Video Transcript
No comments:
Post a Comment