[Molvis-list] Molecular visualisation software and RSI

[Mark Fortner]

Hi Clare,
Here are a few things that you might try:

If the student as access to a Mac running Mac OS X, the operating system has
voice recognition built in.  You can turn it on via the System Preferences.
This should allow him to use it to navigate the menus on any application
running on the Mac.  If there are repetitive tasks, you can probably script
them with Automator, and invoke them in the same manner.  I haven't tried
this out recently, but used this approach with a number of Mac OS 9
applications and it worked pretty well.  You'll need to do some
experimenting to see how well it will work for your student.

There may be a Microsoft alternative to this (
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/setup/expert/moskowitz_02september23.mspx)
although I haven't tried this out.

Hope this helps,

Mark Fortner

On 2/9/07, clare sansom <c.sansom at mail.cryst.bbk.ac.uk> wrote:
>
> Hello,
>
> I am one of the developers of the Internet based courses at Birkbeck
> College, London, one of which - Principles of Protein Structure - makes
> extensive use of molecular visualisation software (Jmol and to some extent
> Rasmol).
>
> We have a student on this course this year who has quite severe repetitive
> strain injury and finds using his hands extremely painful. He uses voice
> recognition software but is having great difficulty getting this to work
> with the visualisation programs we use. They are, as you can guess, an
> integral part of the course.
>
> I would be very interested to know of experiences any of you have had of
> the use of molecular visualisation software - either these packages, or
> others
> - by people with limited use of their hands - so we can figure out how we
> can help him best. We don't want to lose a bright and motivated student...
>
> Many thanks for your help,
>
> Best wishes
>
> Dr. Clare Sansom
> c.sansom at mail.cryst.bbk.ac.uk
> Teaching Fellow, Birkbeck College, London, UK
> Freelance bioinformatics consultant and science writer
>
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