MSQ Difficulty and Exclusion

[Packetdancer]

THANK YOU for taking the time to ask what is causing me difficulties. It is so refreshing to see someone actually take the time to ask about something rather than throw out an uninformed opinion. I have no problem telling you about my condition. I have Parkinson's Disease. That coupled with me being elderly, makes it extremely difficult at times to complete content.

Ah, that's right! We did have this discussion earlier in the thread, I forgot; I mentioned that my father has Parkinson's -- progressed to the point that he's developing cognitive issues, which is depressing and terrifying -- and that I'm considered high-risk myself due to that family history.

(Apologies for forgetting. My own challenge is chronic migraines, and while my medication works very well, it also is a once-a-month medication that lasts just over three weeks. I get to next take it on the 14th; as you might guess, my brain is presently reduced to tapioca and my world is pain for the next four days. Frankly, it's a miracle I can compose coherent posts; I'm functioning on caffeine, painkiller, and possibly spite.)

My limbs, hands and even at times my whole body tend to shake if I get emotionally excited or engage in even minor physical activities (holding a full cup of water for example). Content that is even mildly complex or requires a somewhat significant amount of hand/eye coordination can be a daunting task for me at times.

Out of idle curiosity, do you play with a controller, or a keyboard/mouse?

I know from helping my father that the tremors/shakes, at least as regards hands, are not actually that different in nature from the nerve damage my friend Bryan had; I thus wonder whether the issue you're having is similar -- e.g., not that you can't see what you need to do, just that it's really hard to hit the correct keys with a hand tremor -- and so whether the solution we worked on for him might not also help in your scenario.

As I touched on in a past post, the solution we came up with in his case was a program that he could run that mapped multiple keys on the keyboard to a single key; for instance, taking 'Q', 'W', and 'E' and mapping all of them to 'W' so he could more reliably move forward, etc. We basically just made a keyboard map of regions of the keyboard, and mapped a given set of keys -- usually about six, two rows of three each -- to the keys he was likely to need to use.

Now, we never got past the experimental phase before he died of flu complications (side note: get your flu shots, and if you run a high fever go to the damn hospital); I lacked the heart to finish the project after that, and tossed the code out there into the wild for someone else to use.

Still, the early experiments had been promising, and now I wonder if the same sort of tool might not also help in the case of things like Parkinson's. Obviously it wouldn't be a perfect solution, but...

Edit: Alas, the forum says I've posted enough for today and I'm being cut off. Guess I'll return tomorrow!