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Use One-Handed Keyboards To Type Better With Your Left Hand

People with a dominant left hand often find themselves at a disadvantage almost everywhere they go. Even tech favors those who have a dominant right hand over those who are left-handed. Laptops are seldom built for someone who is left handed and even phones aren’t built to cater to left-handed users. With phones, particularly those with larger screens, navigating with just one hand is often impossible however, if you do manage to use a large phone with just one hand, it’s likely that one hand is your right one. If you are left-handed and the default keyboard makes it hard for you to type with your dominant hand, consider using a ‘one-handed’ keyboard instead.

A one-handed keyboard is built so that you don’t need to use both thumbs and index fingers to type. You can type with one hand and hold your coffee cup in the other. What most one-handed keyboards also do is take into consideration that a user might want to type with either the left or the right hand. They’re built to cater to both needs and hence make it easier for a left-handed person to type more comfortably.

iPhone users can use Word Flow Keyboard from Microsoft. It has a right-arching layout that makes the enter key, the shift/caps key, and the backspace key easier to reach. Android users can simply use Google Keyboard which, as of version 5.0 now supports one-handed typing. It has a layout for both right-handed and left-handed users.

word flow-ios google-keyboard-left

There are of course many other awesome keyboards, both free and paid, available for both Android and iOS that you can use for a better typing experience if you’re left-handed but these two are not only well-developed they’re also free and available for the latest versions of the respective operating systems they run on.

Google Keyboard should update automatically to version 5.0 in a few days. If you’re very eager to test out the new typing experience, you will have to look for the app’s APK. Once you get your hands on it, press and hold the comma key to switch to one-handed typing mode.

Install Work Flow Keyboard From The App Store

Install Google Keyboard From The Google Play Store

1 Comment

  1. Those-called “left handed keyboards” DO NOT address the key problem. Not “key” as in “important”, but rather the literal keys.

    If you touch them in the centre, you get the desired character. If you touch them right of centre, you still get that character. But if you touch it LEFT of centre, these useless keyboards will type the character to the left. This means constant errors (e.g. r when I want t, g when I want h, etc.).

    THESE ARE STILL RIGHT HANDED KEYBOARDS. The sensitivity has NOT been reversed for the benefit of left handed users. We’re STILL forced to reach the far side of keys compared to right handed users who only need to touch the near side..

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